CIRCE builds on the results of the PACE-project, that was dealing with the innovative development of Partial Certificates for lower and medium levels in education.
The CIRCE partnership continues this effort, addressing the whole sector of vocational education and training (VET), but still with an open eye for the needs of disadvantaged people, including people with disabilities.

Most important is the explicit focus of this project on recent and ongoing developments in the economy and on the consequences that we may deduct for the labour market. A constantly developing economy is urging the VET sector to respond with new job profiles and corresponding curricula, but this reponse is in many cases lacking or quite slow.

Moreover, we observed that the official accreditation procedures are often interfering with a quick and adequate innovative change in education. Hardly anything is so successfully resistant to innovation as the national vocational qualification structures. Therefore we expect that our innovative efforts may have effect on the informal part of the training sector first and to influence the formal part in second instance. In fact, this last part of our plan may continue for considerable time after the operational period of the project has ended.