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Further Quality Improvement for VET, guiding teacher Teams in Europe in strategic planning
Start date: Nov 11, 2016, End date: May 10, 2019 PROJECT  FINISHED 

After the successful implementation of the QUAL4T project, that focused on quality awareness by individual teachers, it deemed only a small step to a follow-up project named: Further Quality Improvement in European VET, guiding teacher Teams in their strategic planning (QUAL4T2). The value of the first project but also the needs for the follow-up project were clearly expressed in the final feedback of teachers and trainers from The Netherlands, UK, Spain and Italy, where the pilots took place. In QUAL4T2 the project partners aim to contribute directly to the improvement of outcomes of quality systems in Europe's institutes, by investing in teachers’ professionalization to develop more effectiveness and involvement of teachers/trainers in the quality strategic planning.Teams in VET education are facing the problem of prioritizing how they spend their work day. Teachers need to teach, coach, visit companies, prepare lessons, but also meet as a team to evaluate student results and other outcomes. As a follow up teams need to set aims and plan actions for further improvement in their team plans. It is crucial that the right aims are chosen and the right actions planed! Teachers stated in their feedback in the first QUAL4T project, that they still feel they don’t have enough knowledge and tools to write a good year plan and follow the PDCA-cycle. And this definitely is needed to connect the institutes’ long term strategy and policy with the short term actions on the ‘work floor’ by the teams.This is why the QUAL4T2 project targets the teams in VET-education, why we address our project work to the teachers in teams. But to reach them we also selected quality staff and management as target group.The project will start with a short research and the designing of the pilot version of the Quality Guide. Then four pilots take place, in Netherlands, Spain, Denmark and Italy. Based on the feedback from teams and teachers the final version of the Quality Guide will be made, best practices will be gathered and the five day training program will be developed and given. Both the prototypes as the final products will be published on the website free for use. Besides the implementation in our own institutes we aim to reach schools and policy makers in our partner and other countries and also Higher Education, educating student teachers. The QUAL4T2 project is completely in line with the current European policy targets for 2020 as it aims to improve the investment, performance and efficiency in education and training by a further development of quality assurance mechanisms in VET. As this will be done also by professionalization of teachers and trainers in teams, it also addresses the Adult Education target by extending and developing educators' competences. The QUAL4T project app fits not only in the strategy of Landstede Group and the other partners to invest in a changing quality culture through a bottom-up approach and professionalization. It also fits the no. 1 Dutch priority drafted by the National Agency, the Ministry of OCW and main stakeholders: Quality of education and quality Insurance: Qualitative good education . The Agency invites education to: put education teams central, to invest in a culture of quality care, to focus on professionalization, to investigate in the EQAVET tool. Altogether Landstede Group and her partners and the Dutch policy makers have the same aim: to make VET more attractive! Three main outcomes will be provided, besides international research and pilot reports, a short training programme and a website where all can be downloaded for free in partners languages. 1. A Quality Guide for teams, teachers and quality staff, attractive and easy readable. Teams will find information about the effective use of planning, analyzing quality system outcomes, prioritizing, teamwork versus individual quality improvement, a number of tools that can be used when starting to gather information from the system (with reference to the ice mountain model) and a tool that can be used as a model for a team plan. 2. The Good Practice Guide will contain the effective examples from each of the four pilots. Also it will contain the best practices from the research phase. The guide again will be very approachable for teachers, easy to read and attractive to them and will be published on the website as a pdf-file in all partners languages and English.3. A five days staff training event will be provided to at least 2 team representatives of each partner. It provides participants knowledge about and experience with the Quality and Good Practice guides . A connection will also be made with EQAVET as EU instrument, and capacity building in teams for quality improvement. The training provides both theoretical as practical elements using a mix of diverse and attractive teaching methods. All good practices from the pilots will also be discussed in depth.
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