Research for the new Learning and Skills sector: the fourth annual conference of the FE

Research Network: University of Warwick 11-13 December 2000

Research paper
Hidden Treasure:
The development of European concepts concerning recognition of prior qualifications and
competences in the vocational training of women immigrants
© Pamela M Clayton
In 1998 a training and guidance organisation in Hamburg put together a proposal to the European
Commission, under the Leonardo da Vinci programme1 , for a project on immigrant women. They
invited a local university, a local research institute, a training organisation in Denmark and a human
resource development unit in the Czech Republic to join the bid, along with myself from the
University of Glasgow. We started work in March this year and will finish at the end of May 2001,
after which further results will be published.
First I shall define some terms and describe what the problem is and the research questions arising
from it. Then I shall describe the steps the project team is taking. Following that I shall outline some
of the national differences and commonalities that have emerged from our study so far. Finally I shall
suggest some solutions, and ask you to make your contribution on how this problem can be solved in
the United Kingdom.

Working definitions
Immigrant women are defined as those who originate from countries outside the European Union or
European Economic Area. They may have arrived as refugees, as independent job-seekers,
accompanying husbands or other family members or joining family members already here. The
former Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe are in the position of having both emigrants and
immigrants seeking a better life.
Prior qualifications consist of accredited formal learning undertaken outside the European Union.
Competences include the skills and abilities deriving from work experience, non-accredited training,
voluntary work, self-directed study, foreign language acquisition, social and communicative skills,
organisational skills, intercultural competence and so on. Vocational training is not the term I would
have chosen; but it means courses or programmes that should assist the student to integrate into the
labour market.
Labour market integration means employment or self-employment that allows the individual or
family to live an independent life and fulfil their working potential.

The problem
This can be stated quite briefly. Formal qualifications acquired outside the European Union are
frequently not officially recognised. Even when they are, they are not necessarily accepted by
employers. In the case of refugees in particular, the relevant documents may be missing. As for non-
accredited competences, these are rarely recognised or valued. This is partly because in many cases
women’s abilities are still undervalued; partly from a lack of appreciation of the potential of
immigrant women; and partly because many women themselves do not recognise the value of their
skills, abilities and experience. This lack of recognition by women themselves may be because they
may not have been valued in their country of origin; they may not have received vocational guidance
in the host country; and they may suffer low self-esteem as a result of their experience of
immigration.
One cause of a negative self-image is that, even if they can find a job at all, very few women
immigrants find that they can get one at the same level as they had in their own country, or that is
commensurate with their qualifications. In the United Kingdom, immigrants and women in particular,
especially if they have children, find it hard to get work. Those who do tend to be employed in low-
paid sectors such as personal services, hotels and catering and small factories.
 Hidden Treasure
Pamela M Clayton

Putting aside other aspects of immigration, our focus is on integration into the labour market via
appropriate education and training. From the point of view of women immigrants, this could relieve
their frustration and often poverty; from the point of view of the host nation, this means widening the
pool of available talent, in an era where there is a loudly-proclaimed skills shortage.

The research questions

In order to integrate into the labour market however, there are certain pre-requisites. The first and
most obvious is a good working knowledge of the local language. Others may include both
recognition and updating of existing qualifications and competences; and the acquisition of new skills
according to the current demands of employers. Induction into the local peculiarities of working life
and work culture as well as more general cultural orientation may also be necessary.
We arrived at two broad research questions:
1) Do women immigrants seeking paid work in fact possess qualifications and/or competences?
2) Does the host country possess the mechanisms and the will to recognise or develop such
qualifications and competences?
For labour market integration to occur, the answer to both questions has to be affirmative. Our current
research focuses on the first question.

The methodology
This is not simply a research project but one that aims for practical outcomes - if not actual desired
change, at least a highlighting of the problem to relevant interest groups. Hence the project has a
number of phases, although these overlap as far as the time scale is concerned.
Phase one was to prepare a report on the current situation in each country. This includes, for example,
numbers and origins of immigrants, their labour market situation, legislation on access to education
and employment, types of education and training available and services for immigrants.
The second phase consists of informing a range of expert organisations and individuals about the
project. This is partly dissemination but we also attempt to engage these organisations in the project,
by keeping them informed of its progress and inviting their contributions.
The third, and most substantial, phase consists of interviews with immigrant women. These are
reached largely via services for immigrants. For the United Kingdom I have interviewed thirty (the
agreed maximum). My criterion for selection was that the women should be able to communicate in
English. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, it is difficult (though not impossible) to access
education or the formal labour market without a certain level of English; secondly to hire interpreters
would not only have been too costly but also would risk something being lost in the translation and
impede the building of rapport between myself and the interviewee. The interviews focus on
qualifications and experience obtained up to the present, that is, including the time spent in the United
Kingdom; on skills and competences; and on social and economic integration in the United
Kingdom.The sample consists of women who are trying to improve their labour market position.
Following our analysis of the interview data and of the contributions from national experts, the fourth
phase is to disseminate the findings and the recommendations formulated by the project team. In the
United Kingdom we are holding a conference in London, in Spring 20012 .

National differences and commonalities

Just as immigrant women are so heterogeneous as to make the terms ‘group’ or ‘category’
inappropriate, so the receiving countries differ in a variety of ways. The development of European
concepts, therefore, needs to take into account this diversity as well as the commonalities in the
experience of women on moving to Europe. We need to work out how this diversity can be
accommodated, to what extent practices and policies are transferable between different parts of
Europe and how we can evaluate the effectiveness of different practices and policies.
Some salient national differences

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Pamela M Clayton

There are variations in:

• the structural demands of the labour market, in terms of occupational sectors, the balance between
the private, public and voluntary sectors, working hours and contracts, the size of firms and so on;
• social policy, for example on social benefits, social housing and childcare provision;
• the politico-legal system, for example, in terms of eligibility for benefits, work and education;
policies of internment, concentration in certain areas, dispersal or laisser-faire;
• educational systems, particularly in respect of post-compulsory education, access, progression
routes, flexibility of timing, portability of credits, recognition and/or accreditation of prior
(experiential) learning, the teaching of the national language to non-native speakers;
• support services, such as the availability of vocational guidance and counselling, specialised
services for immigrants and/or refugees, formal networks, housing services;
• cultural aspects, such as the existence or not of cultural integration programmes, official and
informal attitudes towards non-natives and their integration, number and concentration of well-
established immigrants, whether or not the native language is also a world language.

Some national commonalities

These appear to be the case in all the countries participating in the project and it can easily be
conjectured that they are universal throughout Europe:
• immigrants need to know or learn the local language in order to enter the mainstream labour
market;
• non-European qualifications are rarely recognised or valued;
• there is a need to inform new immigrants about the culture and institutions of the receiving country
• immigrant women are not, but are usually treated as if they were, ‘blank sheets of paper’;
• there is a need for mechanisms to have competences recognised and/or accredited;
• there is a need for existing qualifications to be evaluated and re-accredited at the correct level;
• there is a need for officially recognised qualifications to be accepted by employers;
• instead of allowing immigrant women to be concentrated in low-paid, low-skilled jobs, there is a
need to devise ways of using their existing experience and their potential;
• vocational guidance and counselling services could play an important role both to assist immigrant
women and to act as advocates with employers and learning providers, but there is an overall
scarcity of such services;
• local labour market needs have to be analysed and data kept up-to-date in order to give accurate
advice and information on career pathways and opportunities;
• in cases where access to vocational learning and the labour market are already difficult for women,
they are doubly difficult for immigrant women;
• previous immigrants form a potentially valuable resource in helping new immigrants to integrate
or to learn about their new country;
• immigrant women may face racism in direct and indirect ways, and their awareness of this needs to
be raised, with support available to help them confront and overcome it.

The solutions?
Since the data are not yet complete, I cannot answer in a scientific way the question of whether
immigrant women have, or can develop, skills and competences. This is not a random sample as most
of the interviewees were asked to take part in the survey by services that they were using, either for
guidance or training. Further research would be necessary to answer this question definitively,
although survey data on refugees already exist and show that a majority are well-qualified. Based on
the United Kingdom interviews, however, I can state that the women in my sample are often highly
qualified and some have had high-level careers before coming to the United Kingdom. Many have
taken further qualifications here. Most display a good level of communication in English and, when
pressed, admit to a range of non-accredited skills and abilities arising out of their life experience. (The
only ones who confidently produced a positive self-assessment had been through a formal vocational
guidance process.) Moreover, the very fact of coming to live in a new land involves skills, such as

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Pamela M Clayton

learning a new language and culture, negotiating new institutional arrangements, battling bureaucracy
and so on. ‘Learning to learn’ is a key life skill as well as a ‘transferable’, ‘core’ or ‘key’ skill for the
labour market, and the experience of immigration presents, to say the least, an opportunity for such
learning, especially for those who attempt to become part of the new society.
As for the second research question, the extent and willingness of host country institutions to
recognise and assist in the development of women immigrants’ potential, the broad answer is very
mixed. Rather like house prices, location is all. There is not time in this short paper to summarise the
situation in other European countries, and I have not yet completed this part of the research for the
United Kingdom - though the phrase ‘location is all’ applies within the United Kingdom as well as
within the rest of Europe.
So instead of mapping what exists, I would like to end by making some suggestions as to what would
be helpful, whatever the current situation in different areas of the United Kingdom. I should say that
there are examples of good practice in some of these areas already, particularly where this is a large
concentration of immigrants, as in the East End of London. So here are my thoughts:
• programmes of integration for immigrants who want them (but no sanctions against those who do
not);
• expert assessment of language competence and appropriate remedial courses where necessary;
• integration of linguistic and vocational education, such that these take place together, but without
teaching only a narrow range of vocabulary such as ‘business English’;
• use of Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL) and Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning
(APEL), available in all institutions of further and higher education, so that educational providers
may recognise women’s existing level of education, skills and abilities rather than treating them as
blank pages;
• universal access to vocational guidance services offering paths to education/training, employment
and self-employment, and undertaking APL and APEL in order to assist employers.
Before I finish, I would like to try to pre-empt one possible question: why should these not be
available to all who need them, not just to immigrant women? My answer would be that they should -
and if we can demonstrate the need for the most difficult group, immigrant women, we can go on to
widen the target groups.
I would be very happy to hear from you, by post to:
Dr Pamela Clayton, Research Fellow, Department of Adult and Continuing Education
University of Glasgow
57-61 Oakfield Avenue, Glasgow G12 8LW
or by e-mail to: pamela.clayton@ntlworld.com (and please copy all e-mails to:
P.Clayton@educ.gla.ac.uk)

1
The views expressed in this paper are those of the research team and do not necessarily reflect those
of our funders: the Leonardo da Vinci Programme of the European Communities; Gesellschaft für
Arbeit, Technik und Entwicklung mbH (GATE), Hamburg; Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Politik,
Hamburg; Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg Amt für Berufliche Bildung und Weiterbildung; the
University of Glasgow; AMU-Centre, Aarhus; and DHV CR, Prague.
2
Hidden Treasure, 21st March 2001, on the Docklands Campus of the University of East London.
This is being organised by Val Nobbs at the Bridge Project, 116 Cavell Street, London E1 2JA, tel.
0207 247 7819, email: admin@bridgeproject.co.uk