COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF POLICY APPROACHES RELATED TO NON-FORMAL AND INFORMAL LEARNING IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

As each country has had its own pace in developing arrangements for validation of non-formal and informal learning (VNFIL), taking into account the Council Recommendation from 2012, the interest in the present article is to analyse and compare policy approaches used in several European countries. The countries selected, namely France, Romania and Poland, have all joined the European Union prior to the issuing of the Recommendation, for which reason it is presumed that the content of the recommendation may have contributed to mobilizing endeavours for validation based on the existing framework. The selection of countries included in the analysis was performed based on a set of criteria that would enable comparison of similar countries in size (territorial, population), as well as type of state government (unitary), while also looking at EU member states that joined the EU at different moments in time. Thus, the present article briefly presents specificities for each country, based mainly on information provided in different European reports (e.g. CEDEFOP reports and database on VNFIL approaches in the respective countries), while also highlighting aspects that could be taken into account as possible improvements in the content ofthe Romanian policies. Quality assurance for the recent mechanisms is to be further analysed, since the qualification acquired by the individual by use of VNFIL is similar to that obtained in formal education, given possible trust issues related to quality assurance mechanisms for VNFIL. Thus, further analyses may focus on stakeholders involved, and on quality assurance mechanisms within validation systems.