International conference put an end of two years of work for expanding BEQUAL benchmarking tool and community of practice for quality assurance in vocational education and training.  The BEQUAL+ project was financed under EU Leonardo Da Vinci Programme (2011-2013) and brought together partners from Bulgaria, Italy, Turkey and Greece to transfer innovative techniques for self-evaluation of quality assurance practices in vocational education and training, quality benchmarking and networking. The innovative content transferred consists of electronic benchmarking tool for quality assurance in VET, offering opportunity for VET providers to compare their performance with similar institutions, web based quality sharing network and good practice center and thematic portal as a reference point for practitioners, researchers and policy makers in VET.

The partners presented the project activities and achieved results at the final conference, held on 20 September 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria. Among the participants were VET providers,  representatives of Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science, Ministry of Economy and Energy, Office of the President of Republic of Bulgaria, educational experts, social partners, etc.

The functionalities of the BEQUAL Benchmarking Tool and Good Practice Center were demonstrated in details. The participants discussed the sustainability of the project results   and their potential to be embedded in the VET quality assurance policies and practices.

We also presented of  how our international cooperation provided opportunity for  synergy between two EU projects (BEQUAL+ and EXPANDVET) that use the same platform www.bequal.info . Three representatives of EXPANDVET partners attended the BEQUAL + final conference and provided details on how we collaborated to learn from each other and to improve the innovative content.