A clearly identified focus for the quality concept may help to draft a vision and mission for a VET institution, promoting sustainable development and creation of a quality culture. Visions and missions provide an emotional and intellectual superstructure for quality culture: they sharpen the corporate identity of a VET institution and strengthen staff members’ identification with and commitment to quality.

A vision is a positive expression of forward-looking expectations on what the institution should be in the future. Applying a long-term view, it describes a state for the institution, which does not yet exist, but which it should be feasible to reach in the future. To ensure its feasibility, your vision needs to be interlinked and cross-checked with the development strategy for your VET organisation (see Section 3.5).

A mission is the means to achieve successfully your vision. In its mission a VET organisation states its self-image, its fundamental principles and its main objectives. The mission is to provide orientation for the organisation as a whole and to guide daily activities of individual staff members. The mission is part of normative management and provides a framework for strategies, quality objectives and operational actions.

To the public, a mission should make the organisation’s fundamental purpose clear and help to communicate to stakeholders its strategic quality alignments.

Box 40. Example of a mission for a VET institution

There are many different perceptions of what culture means. As the term is broadly understood, every social phenomenon is characterised as ‘cultural’ and thus culture is used as a rhetorical term without a deeper significance. A more specific meaning of the term underlines that every culture is ‘produced’ by a certain group of people. Following this understanding, every culture has specific conceptions of practical organisation of its daily activities, which are based on common patterns of knowledge and belief, morals and law, customs, behaviour, and rules for making decisions. In these essential aspects, culture can be understood as an expression of specific values and ethics.

These basic values are the driving forces behind every quality culture within a VET institution, as they constitute the basis for understanding its vision, mission and quality objectives (see Figure 20).

Box 41. A piece of advice

Figure 20. Values: basis of vision, mission and quality objectives

Source: CEDEFOP.

Values should be durable and therefore must be determined with particular care. The values you select should mirror your concept and focus of quality: they must refer to your tradition and environment, be appropriate for the organisation’s future development and, last but not least, be suitable to be anchored in students’ minds.

The more clearly you articulate the values guiding your organisation, the less time and resources you will spend on communicating strategic direction, generating staff commitment and terminating unwanted behaviour.

Figure 21 presents an example of values which might be typical for a quality-committed VET institution.

The ring of exemplary values is organised in three axes with correlating values at their ends, which means that the axes depict interrelated values which complement one another. The main axis is the vertical one, stressing at the top the overall quest for quality and excellence in the organisation, but outstanding professional performance is based on personal integrity and ethical standards. The common grounding of values is of particular importance, to avoid any one-sidedness that would result from moving forward with tunnel vision towards an overall dominating value which gains an independent existence.

Figure 21. An example of values for a VET institution

Source: CEDEFOP.

Each value represents a condensed description of activities and in Table 5 exemplary values are described in conjunction with their associated activities.

Table 5. An example of values and associated activities

Source: CEDEFOP.

Clearly articulated values and a complementary vision and mission will acquire particular significance when drawn up in partnership with relevant stakeholders of your organisation. But ideas on guiding values will never be uniform; individual people prefer different values and have different perceptions of the values important for their VET organisation. Individual stakeholders may even support contradictory values.

Developing a shared vision and mission is not an easy task and it should involve staff from an early stage. Careful balancing of leadership and involvement of stakeholders is required, as is clear decision-making in case of conflicts. But finally, the effort made to establish an internal quality culture should pay off, as shown in Box 42.

Box 42. Development of a shared vision and mission

Box 43. Questions for reflection and options for further action