REVEAL had a stand at the first validation festival carried out in Brussels with more than 300 participants. We presented our network, the LEVEL5 approach and the running projects.

There is a small video on Tim’s 2 min pitch about REVEAL; please have a look.

There was a lot of interest especially in our projects and initiatives on entrepreneurship (REBUS),  our integration projects that include LEVEL5 like COME IN, REST and VIC and on cultural heritage and validation (BADGES) .

We had vintensive discussions related to the EntreCOMP project of the European Commission which has strong links to REBUS approach.

New project ideas were outlined in the field of integration (NL), VET (e.g. on CPD for circus artists), Waldorf schools and in regional cooperation (South France).

Though the festival was impressive (from location and number of participants) there was a focus either on VET projects who do validation in the formal way or a high representation of umbrella organisations who rather came with policy statements and rather general approaches, initiated top-down.

Eventually the festival revealed that not many projects and initiatives do yet build their validation on a sound taxonomy and that there is a need for a more profound approach to validation in informal learning settings.

On the second day it became very clear in one input that the employers’ perspective has to be considered and that we need more projects on the practical and local level in order to bring validation to the practical level.