WORK BASED LEARNING AS INTEGRATED CURRICULUM. DISTILLING GOOD PRACTICES IN EUROPE

Work Based Learning has become an important theme in the development of approaches to ensuring that higher education provides work/practice relevant learning. It figures strongly in discussion of employability, work relevant skills, ‘graduateness’ and life long learning. In general exchange, it encompasses a wide range of experience from short term work experience, through placements/practicum to required periods of pre-qualification professional practice.

In some cases the form, duration or the specific curriculum requirements are determined by the state or by a designated national professional body. This is common in areas such as medicine. In such cases, competence to practice is assessed based upon successful completion of a curriculum produced and delivered jointly by practitioners and academics (who in fact often wear both hats) and significant periods of work based learning are an integral requirement. In some cases, curriculum requirements have a European dimension through formal Directives.
This fully integrated approach to work relevant curriculum development is not as apparent in many other areas where academic curriculum in Higher Education is largely determined by university staff, and practice experience, where it exists, is taken to have general experiential value, and is often not assessed/accredited against formal qualification requirements.

This paper focuses upon the results of an Erasmus funded project (518586-LLP-1-2011-1-UK-ERASMUS-ECUE) in those relatively few cases where the fully integrated approach to curriculum development and delivery is used in an area where no professional or statutory constraint to do so exists; and where, largely as a consequence, Work Based Learning is an essential and central feature of the learning experience.
There are, for example, some cases where a partnership has been established between a university and a company/group of companies in which the whole learning experience is the outcome of joint development and subsequent delivery by both academics and practitioners, and where the essential focus of the experience has moved from the Higher Education institution to the work place.
In looking at examples of such partnerships in different European countries, we aim to identify some common principles and best practices through which to facilitate and promote such partnerships elsewhere in Europe.