Peer Review is a voluntary, formative and external evaluation procedure that enables a personalised, bottom-up and dialogue-oriented evaluation. An external group of experts, called Peers, from colleague validation providers are invited to assess the quality of validation providers. During the evaluation process, the Peers visit the reviewed institution and provide feedback about requested quality areas.

Peer Review also contributes to the human resources management of organisations and increases their innovation potential. Peer Review is cost-effective and it fosters networking and exchange between providers. Transnational Peer Review in particular supports international exchange and mutual learning between providers in Europe. This could be used to strengthen mutual trust between providers in European Member States and strengthen the credibility of transnational validation systems.

As proven by the Peer Review VNFIL Extended project, Peer Review is a promising instrument for the development of VNFIL provision, for the improvement its quality and most importantly, for a better transnational use of VNFIL in Europe. Peer Review has proven to be effective in supporting VNFIL systems in different countries by providing a common, European framework as well as different tools to VNFIL providers, organisations and policy-makers at the national, regional and local level.