We cancelled the competition. Here is what we ran instead
Skills+ 3.0 is built around competitions. National rounds, a European final, teams, tests, a ranking. For a lot of young people that format works exactly as intended: the pressure is the point, and winning means something because losing was possible.
Then you sit in a room with a teacher who knows her pupils. She tells you plainly what a ranking would do to this particular group, and you have a choice to make.
On Tuesday 13 October at Instituut Bert Carlier in Ghent, we did not run a competition. We ran a toonmoment, a showcase. One team per assignment. No ranking. A medal and a certificate for everyone.
What a showcase moment actually is
Two teams, each with a buddy alongside them. One team took on cooking. The other took on housekeeping: preparing a room to a professional standard, the skill behind every hotel, care home and serviced building in Europe, and almost never treated as a skill in public.
Each assignment runs 120 minutes. The tasks are the real Skills+ 3.0 assignments, unchanged, the same ones their peers will face at the European event. Materials, timing, standard: identical to the competition version. The only thing we removed was the ranking.
Why that is not a softer version
There is a reflex in inclusion work that says: make it gentler, lower the bar, let everyone feel good. That reflex is condescending, and young people can smell it from the corridor.
This was not that. The assignment was not made easier. The two hours were not extended. What changed is that the pupils were measured against the task rather than against each other. For learners in specialised secondary education (BuSO), that is very often the difference between a day that builds confidence and a day that confirms a suspicion they have carried since primary school.
And here is the part that matters for anyone designing a programme like this: the showcase produced the same evidence a competition would have. We saw who can hold a sequence of steps under time pressure. Who recovers when something goes wrong at minute 80. Who checks their own work before saying they are finished. Those observations tell a teacher, and an employer, something true. We did not need to tell anyone they came second to see any of it.
Is your school or organisation wondering whether a showcase could work for you? A twenty-minute conversation tells you. Write to liliana.carrillo@collectiveup.be.
These pupils are going to the Netherlands
This is what makes the format work rather than merely kind. The showcase is not a consolation prize. The teams go on to the Skills+ 3.0 European event in the Netherlands in November, hosted by our project lead Stichting Kenniscentrum Pro Work, alongside teams from across the partnership.
And CollectiveUP covers the cost: all materials for the local round, plus travel, accommodation and meals in the Netherlands for the pupils and the accompanying teacher. Zero cost to the school, the pupils or their parents. We say that loudly because it is the objection that stops most schools before they start. A programme that reaches only schools with a budget for it is not an inclusion programme.
What this says about vocational education
Belgium has a disability employment gap of more than 33 percentage points, among the widest in the European Union. Only around 23% of people severely limited in their daily activities are employed here.
Those numbers do not come from a shortage of capability. They come from a long chain of small moments in which a young person is shown, politely, that the serious version of a thing is for someone else, and the demonstration version is for them. Inverting that chain is unglamorous work. It looks like: same task, same clock, same standard, different scoreboard. It looks like a teacher who knows which adjustment protects dignity and which one removes challenge, and a project willing to listen to her instead of defending its own format.
Our thanks to Pieternel Sebrechts and the team at Instituut Bert Carlier, who made the call that shaped the day, and to the pupils, who did the actual work.
Work with us
A school in Flanders (BuSO, OV3 or OV4)? There is still room in the Skills+ 3.0 network. We bring the materials, and the cost to you is zero.
An employer, sector federation or public employment service serious about closing that 33-point gap? Come and watch a showcase. It is a faster education than any report we could send you.
Either way: liliana.carrillo@collectiveup.be
Skills+ 3.0 (Project No. 2023-1-NL01-KA220-ADU-000156772) is co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, coordinated by Stichting Kenniscentrum Pro Work with partners in eight countries. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority.
#SkillsPlus #Inclusion #BuSO #VocationalEducation #DisabilityEmployment #ErasmusPlus #Ghent #Vlaanderen #YouthSkills #CollectiveUP
