Similarly to other European countries there have been three parallel processes in Hungary leading to the use of learning outcomes as a means of improving the relevance of teacher education. The first is the development of a competence framework for the teaching profession (going back to the late nineties). The second is the revision of higher education programs in the framework of the Bologna process leading to the establishment of MA level teacher education programs based on common competence requirements. The third is the development of a National Qualifications Framework as the implementation of EQF. These, partly external, influences have been common in several European higher education systems, especially in Central and Eastern Europe (Dobbins - Knill, 2009; Dobbins, 2015; Vukasovic, 2015; Fransson - Friberg, 2015) producing mixed outcomes (Allais, 2014). All these initiatives incited curriculum revision processes in teacher education, guided by learning outcomes as largely based on the competences required by teachers in their daily practice in schools. This has pressed teacher educators to rethink teacher education programs in the light of the skills needs of schools, and has significantly strengthened the practical orientation of teacher education programs. This process, its outcomes, strengths and weaknesses will be analysed in the proposed presentation. The analysis will rely on a major European comparative study, with Hungary as one of the national cases examined, in which the author was a lead expert (see Wiśniewski et al., 2015; Halasz, 2017).

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