From September 8th to September 9th, the Sub-session on Education and Culture of the 2020 Taihe Civilizations Forum was successfully held online. Vocational education experts and scholars, representatives of higher-education institutions and business community from China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Cambodia and other countries, worked around the theme of “Building a career map for future talents”. Topics like vocational qualification frameworks, the reform of vocational education in the post-pandemic era, vocational education and specialist certification, vocational education policy coordination and transnational cooperation were discussed in detail.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 has damaged the global economy and brought new changes and challenges to both the supply of and demand for industrial skills. According to Craig Robertson, President of the World Association of Vocational and Applied Universities and chief executive of the Council of Heads of Vocational Colleges of Australia (TDA), the COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant shrinking of economic activities. In addition, the impact of new technologies in different industries is growing stronger, so over the next four to five years, countries should focus on building higher quality vocational education, cultivating talents with new vocational skills and filling the talent gap. Craig Robertson also stressed the practical significance of increasing investment in low-and semi-skilled talent development. Another thing worth noticing is that, according to him, we should focus on the cultivation of information technology skills, learning skills and innovation ability of future vocational talents, so that they had the qualities needed to meet the challenges of the future. During the pandemic, vocational education teachers in many countries have also faced new challenges from online teaching. Gao Yang, Director of the Department of Finance and Arts at Tianjin City Vocational College and researcher of the China-New Zealand vocational education demonstration project, mentioned that the pandemic had turned online teaching from a teaching aid into a major tool. Although front-line teachers had already adapted to this new teaching model, their teaching methods still needed improving. Students’ online learning and other autonomous learning behaviors should be taken into account in the assessment process. Yok Sothy, President of the National Skills Training Institute of Cambodia, Kato Yosuke from the Higashigashi Academy of Japan and Wang Dongjiang, Director-General of the Beijing Municipal Education Commission, also introduced useful practices from their countries and regions to improve teacher training, online teaching, and fieldwork during the pandemic respectively. Participants at the forum all agreed that the necessary reform measures adopted by countries during the pandemic have provided practical experiences for future systematic reforms.

In the Sub-session on Education and Culture, the possibility of establishing a qualification framework in China was discussed. Ma Yansheng, Senior Fellow of the Taihe Institute and Minister-Counselor for Education at the Chinese Embassy in France (2013-2017), stated that China could learn from the useful experience of Europe when building its own national qualification framework. With such a framework, learning outcomes in all forms would be respected and cross-border mobility for learners and workers encouraged. Through their specific design, qualifications should convey clearly to all sectors of society how are the talents needed in the market, the necessary knowledge and skills to be mastered by job seekers, and how the education and training system should reflect the teaching and training content, etc. Liu Jinghui, Senior Fellow of the Taihe Institute and Secretary-General of the China Scholarship Council (2008-2017), believed that China’s establishment of the national qualification framework was a systematic project, as it should address the problems not only of mechanism and system, but of social consensus. In addition, it should be linked up with international qualification frameworks. In this way, we could facilitate cooperation in education and training with countries along the Belt and Road, achieve mutual recognition and the transferability of qualifications and credits in these fields.

Professor John Clayton, Tokorau Institute of Indigenous Innovation, Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārang, New Zealand, and Professor Zhao Zhiqun, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, focused on the reform of Micro-credentials and the evaluation technology of vocational education. Professor John Clayton stated that Micro-credentials in New Zealand and One Plus X certificates in China have a very similar focus. A Micro-credentials and One Plus X certificates both recognize the achievement of a specifically defined outcome that includes knowledge, skills and attitudes that are significant and stand alone. This independent acknowledgement of accomplishment through the award of a One Plus X certificates or a Micro-credentials serves to enhance and extend the depth of existing qualifications and the professional standing of employees. For the credentials to be internationally recognized, we need to devise a benchmark corresponding to international standards. This would enable us to provide transparency in training provision that conforms with agreed international frameworks and learning outcomes, and provide a common understanding of processes and procedures of credit validation, accumulation and transfer. Moreover, the consistency of the assessments undertaken needed to be assured, and an elastic assessment approach was needed to gather the appropriate evidence of competency. Professor Zhao Zhiqun thought that the establishment of the One Plus X certificate was an important part of China’s vocational education reform, and the evaluation of the X certificate must be scientific enough to ensure the success of this reform. A high-quality evaluation system should be reliable, valid, discriminative and objective. The evaluation of knowledge, skills and that of competence, both indispensable, should complement one another. According to Zhao Zhiqun, standardized tests were not suitable for vocational education and might even hinder innovation, so the One Plus X evaluation system should establish corresponding evaluation models in accordance with different certificate contents.

The participants at the forum also discussed topics related to vocational education cooperation between China and other countries. Chrea Sesokunthearith, Director of the International Cooperation Department of the National Skills Training Center of Cambodia, expressed his hope for discussions with China about the establishment of a mechanism for mutual recognition of vocational qualification levels. Song Kai, Director of the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association and Secretary-General of the National Nonferrous Metals Vocational Education Steering Committee, said China’s nonferrous metals industry had invested in a large number of mining projects in Asia and Africa, especially in countries along the “Belt and Road”, employing nearly 500,000 local employees in partner countries. In the post-pandemic era, technicians had experienced a major supply-side demand, so multilateral cooperation to cultivate high-quality professional technicians represented an urgent need and important guarantee for the deepening of the BRI. Yang Po, Associate Professor and Director of Department of Economics of Education and Administration, Graduate School of Education, Peking University, made suggestions on China's participation in multilateral cooperation in vocational education, based on the research into national skill formation systems. She stressed that China’s vocational education cooperation with other countries must take full account of their particular political, economic, cultural realities. In order to speed up multilateral skills cooperation, we should take the lead in promoting the diverse government-school-enterprise cooperation models developed in China, and try to establish a skills investment model coordinated by local governments in the host country to form an attractive experimental zone for cross-border vocational education.

This sub-session was held at a particularly appropriate time to discuss vocational education. Gu Boping, Chief Cultural Scholar of the Taihe Institute and member of the CPPCC National Committee, said that education was an important element of cultural exchanges, and vocational education, as an important type of education, connected economic and social development and the public interest in a most direct way. Based on current economic and social development, we needed to pay more attention to research into the reform and development of, and promote international cooperation in vocational education, for this was the most necessary and effective way to strengthen cultural exchanges between China and the rest of the world. According to Yang Hao, Executive Director of the Taihe Institute and vice president of Perfect World Education, three consensuses were reached by the participants through two online meetings and a closed-door discussion. First, the COVID-19 outbreak and the development of new technology had triggered global economic changes and industrial adjustments as well as a new round of vocational education reform; second, vocational qualification frameworks were commonly used in most countries with advanced vocational education, and China should also take it as an important direction in its own vocational education reform; third, different countries should learn from each other and strengthen cooperation in vocational education. All parties participating in the forum would share cooperation information, create cooperation opportunities and enjoy win-win results in the future.