Introduction

The European Synthesis Report is the first one of the joint European reports of the European cooperation project “Work & Learning Partners” (WLP). The project has been funded in the years 2004-2006 as a pilot project by the European action programme Leonardo da Vinci. The aim of the project has been to raise awareness of workplace learning partnerships and to develop tools that promote related know-how across Europe.

The project has committed itself to prepare two European reports that give an overview of the joint findings and learning experiences. The first one – the European Synthesis Report presents an overview on the analyses of workplace learning partnerships in different countries and on the possibilities for mutual learning between different innovation concepts in Europe. The second one – the Process Development Report –gives a picture of the gradual evolution of the project and provides insights into the joint learning experiences that have been made during different evolutionary phases.

In European cooperation projects project the role of a synthesis report is often reduced to summarising the main contents of country reports and complementing the picture with some cross-cutting analyses. However, in trans-national cooperation projects that have been working in the field of vocational education and training (VET) there is often a need to go deeper with comparative analyses. It is widely known that the diversity of national VET systems (and related cultures of education and training) limit the readiness for European cooperation. Equally, it is widely known that European innovation concepts in VET arise from specific national grounds and are expressed with culturally specific concepts. Therefore, in order to promote successful European cooperation (and trans-national transfer of ideas and innovations), the projects have to be able to europeanise their approach and to relate the national activities to the European group picture.

In the light of the above the European Synthesis Report of the WLP project analyses the effort of WLP project to

1. europeanise the ideas of promoting workplace learning partnerships that originally emerge from the German contexts,
2. to develop a common overview of different partnership concepts and developmental approaches of the national partners,
3. to develop a common tools and facilities that support the development of workplace learning partnerships and
4. to incorporate the use of web applications and web services into the national and European approaches to promote workplace learning partnerships.

Based on these background analyses the WLP project has drawn conclusions at two levels:

1. The WLP project developed a working agreement on diversified piloting (or dissemination) agendas on the basis which the national partners were able to adjust their national activities to their own circumstances (Conclusions I).
2. The WLP project adopted a diversified approach to using of web resources. For this approach it has been essential to provide different entries to the project results and to the multimedia products and to support the utilisation with the WLP Course (Conclusions II).