The EU Introduction of Learning Outcomes: Norms and Standards versus Transparency and Comparability of Qualifications?

The introduction of Learning Outcomes aims to reform education and training at a national and multi-country level. They thereby acquire a central role in policy reforms that could affect all educational and administrative levels. Learning Outcomes are introduced in order to displace input to output categories. This shift is meant to make qualifications more transparent, notably by means of the European Qualification Framework upheld by Learning Outcomes. The purpose of this article is to contribute to a debate about which theoretical perspectives that are apt to capture central characteristics of the education policy of the European Union. The empirical material sustaining the article suggests that discourse theories serve this purpose in so far as they are supplemented by reform theories and institutional perspectives on education and training. One conclusion is that the theoretical strand ‘discursive institutionalism’ is useful for combining these theories.