Developing new-generation fashion VET training through Sustainability Actions

<< Background >>The partners joined forces around the common goal of creating innovative, state-of-the art vocational education regarding textile sustainability. The need to tackle this challenge using complementary expertise and through a cross-country lens was obvious from the start: only by pulling together different experiences, partners could come up with a holistic educational solution that adapts globally without losing its local effectiveness. As such, the main need was to first come up with workable and innovative solutions to vocational education and informal learning content and formats, surrounding the topic of sustainable textile innovations. This remains a grey area in most of the EU, with small exceptions of North Europe where research is going hand-in-hand with education. Then, the aim was to create sleek tools that can be easily used by vocational education orgnisations as well as independent learners to update their skills in terms of textile sustainability. Thirdly, to address the need for more cohesive and tailored programs of education that are self-paced but can provide personal support to learners. Lastly, to update vocational institutions’ activities by helping them to adopt identified best practices in their activity. << Objectives >>The purpose of our project has been to fill in the gap in vocational education for meaningful and effective training, by addressing an area rarely covered by educational initiatives: sustainable textile innovations. To achieve this, we aimed at:generating fashion strategies that are adapted to contemporary and prospective requirements of vocational education and informal learning pathsdeveloping a concrete toolkit with actionable educational instruments such as report cards, material libraries and other helpful resources for VET orgsations, textile designers, entrepreneurs, employees, and trainerssetting up a mentoring programme addressing contemporary learning needs in terms of sustainable textile innovations that supports learners to develop durable business activities.establishing a network of VET entities to discuss best practices for sustainable fashion These specific objectives led to the formulation of two key areas in our project. The first one looked at the exploration and mapping of best practices around sustainable textile innovations and resulting in an educational toolkit. The second one looked at effective programs for building skills in an independent and holistic manner, such as mentoring initiatives. << Implementation >>Our project was divided in 2 key activities, building upon each other, in order to reach the end goal: to fill in the gap for meaningful and effective VET training about sustainable textile innovations. The first activity was intended to set up the Training platform with the educational toolkit. To this aim, the following tasks were completed: creating 20 sustainability report cards mapping the level of sustainability of selected examples of sustainable textile innovations, designing a tailored research methodology for the scientific measurement of sustainability, the production of research documentation leading to the setup of a digital material library. In addition to the methodological tasks, technical tasks were added for building the platform backend, the visual layout of the report cards and the integration of resources. For activity 2 we have piloted a mentoring programme that used the knowledge of the toolkit to construct an innovative educational format, able to respond to the contemporary educational needs of the textile and design sectors. The common backbone was set up and each partner tailored the program and content in their own countries, focusing on the local needs of participants.<< Results >>The core outputs are:An educational toolkit, including: 20 sustainability report cards built after the methodology of the University of Maryland;A digital library of textile innovations offering best practices in sustainable textiles An innovative mentoring programme, including:Info about the main building blocks/workshops of the programmeCore learning resources (handouts, videos, templates, maps etc) for developing experimental products and business modelsAdditional learning resources such as videos, interviews and articles about textile innovations, strategies and business modelsOther results are: A multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural team fostering the study of sustainable textile innovations;An expanded network of sustainable textile educators through the involvement of educators and VET schools in partner countries (+Greece as an external VET partner). A solid and accessible methodology able to retrieve the impact of textile innovations on territories that will be presented in the 2026 special issue of the Design Journal of University of Cataluna.A long-term vision for accessible education, by liaising with similar initiatives (researchers from Norway; Ireland – Enterprise Hub; Brussels - WCC)