New Skills for VET Teachers

The skill set and role of VET teachers is being outpaced by the development of working life. Jobs and occupations are changing so much that VET organisations do not yet fully understand how the changes may affect teachers and how they should react. In general, VET organisations tend to be bureaucratic, slow to respond to market need and find it difficult to be agile and adaptable. In order to succeed in future, VET organisations need to change and become more flexible, like small innovative businesses. The pace of innovation and changing skills requirements across all sectors of working life is increasing and learners expect teaching and learning practices to reflect this pace of change. However, many VET teachers hold traditional attitudes to the role of teaching practice and have been slow to respond. Further, the VET “customer base” is becoming more diverse with school leavers (post 16 years) forming only part of the student body. Indeed, in direct response to economic need, there are now increasing numbers of adults with no previous secondary education, people wanting to change profession, professionals aiming to strengthen and deepen their professional competence, unemployed people and immigrants or asylum seekers making up a significant part of the student body. The profession of vocational teaching is constantly in transformation and solutions are needed on how to upskill staff with skills for the 21st Century.

We have five partners from three different countries - Finland, The Netherlands and UK - from secondary or tertiary level VET organisations and one school of professional teacher education. The project participants are managers, Human Resource staff and teachers. All partners have participated in multiple EU
projects over the last few years and have a common concern about the need for VET organisations to find ways to ensure that teaching skills meet the needs of working life now and in the future. Similar challenges and phenomena are being experienced across Europe and it is vital that VET organisations find new ways to improve teacher professional learning to address these challenges. This project will go some way to addressing this need by sharing views, approach to various challenges and good practices on how to provide new skills for VET teachers across Europe.

The project will incorporate 3 workshops with each workshop addressing a specific issue related to teacher professional skills development. Planned topics for the workshops include lifelong learning; interaction between companies and educational organisations; dealing with changes in work life and how to
respond in a flexible way; and adapting to student diversity. The outputs from each workshop will be collated and presented in the form of articles, digital tools and knowledge bases and uploaded to an on-line tool kit.

The result of the project will be that the participants will gain new ideas on how to ensure and improve teacher professional learning. VET providers will have found ways to ensure that teachers’ skills meet the needs of working life now and in the future and new ways to improve teacher professional learning. Participants will have shared knowledge of the education challenges and phenomena across Europe. It is anticipated that the workshops will support project partners to carry out testing and implementation in order to develop their own methodology for staff training and development. By the end of the project, management and Human Resource departments will have created a clear vision on how to best train their staff and implement these changes in the areas of lifelong learning; interaction between companies and education organisations; dealing with changes to working life and how to respond in a flexible way; and adapting to student diversity.