The Communiqué of the Conference of European Ministers responsible for Higher Education held in Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve on 28 and 29 April 2009 underlined that successful policies for lifelong learning should include basic principles and procedures for the recognition of prior learning on the basis of learning outcomes, while the Council conclusions of 28 November 2011 on the modernisation of higher education called upon Member States to develop clear routes into higher education from vocational and other types of education, as well as mechanisms for recognising prior learning and experience gained outside formal education and traini ...[+++]ng.

75. Invites tertiary education institutions to incorporate a properly paid, high-quality traineeship into study programmes where appropriate in order to enable young people to prepare themselves for working life, and especially in order to enable them to access jobs requiring high-level qualifications; points out that such traineeships must not take the place of real jobs and must offer adequate pay and welfare protection, and stresses the need for labour-market recognition of such traineeships; calls on the Member States to develop policies that promote the recruitment of young people;

75. Invites tertiary education institutions to incorporate a properly paid, high-quality traineeship into study programmes where appropriate in order to enable young people to prepare themselves for working life, and especially in order to enable them to access jobs requiring high-level qualifications; points out that such traineeships must not take the place of real jobs and must offer adequate pay and welfare protection, and stresses the need for labour-market recognition of such traineeships; calls on the Member States to develop policies that promote the recruitment of young people;

Around half of the countries claim that quality assurance in their VET systems does help to gain access to higher education through different mechanisms: quality assured VET qualifications are either recognised as a normal entry qualification to HE (e.g. IE, NL) or have a double status, educational and vocational (e.g. PT).

Women must be given: the choice to marry or not; the choice to have children or not, to have a career, to have further education or not, to stay at home, to go out into the workplace, to start a business or to have access to property.

The real issue here is the restoration of choices to all women: the choice to marry or not; the choice to have children or not, to have a career, to have further education or not, to stay at home, to go out into the workplace, to start a business or to have access to property.