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.
After the first 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). In QUAL4T2 the project partners aimed 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. After evaluation and analyses, as a follow up teams need to set aims and plan actions for further improvement. In the 0-questionnaire teachers stated that they feel they don’t have enough knowledge and tools to write a good year plan, and that often they daubt if they are performing the right actions for the aimed improvement or change. So the project partners started to develop products fitting with the needs of the teacher teams! Quality guide and toolkit for teams The guide and tools were first developed in a pilot version, so that they could be tested and improved. After the pilot in the five partner organisations we could conclude that the Quality tools and the guide that we tested, inluenced both the teamculture as the efficiency of the team plan in a positive way! Nevertheless, the partners from Netherlands, Spain, Denmark and Italy asked the teams once more for feedback, and guide and tools have been improved for the final version. The Greek partner desided as an extra to test a number of tools as well, delivering extra input for the final versions. The transnational pilot report gathered all the outcomes of the pilots per partner, and also overall outcomes. SWOT analyses have been included in all partner chapters. The themes for the Qality tools are: A - Working on a quality culture for teams, B - Tools for an effective team year-plan and C - Team plan models. Tools from these theme's are for instance: Lighthouse, Feedback giving, Route to a team plan and Risk analysing. All tools have been published in Word-documents, so that teacher teams have the option to adapt the tools to their own situation. Story book This good practice guide is built up as a story book. In this book, readers travel through five Vocational Education and Training organisations in five European countries (NL, ES, EL, DK and IT) and enjoy the stories gained from teacher teams. Readers learn about the frustrations when something did not go as well expected… Share the euphoria when a success was reached… Enjoy these precious stories in which teams really move forward to further excellence in Vocational Education and Training! The Story Book includes many pictures of teams in action. It provides easy to read experiences, and may help other teams in Europe in their travel towards a good team plan. Training programme Finally a five day transnational training programme took place in Rome, for a mixed group of partners' staff, thus preparing the participants to be ambassadors for the project after the project ends. All participants in the training event found the project results very relevant for their work. Some were less experienced and they were very happy with the training. Even the more experienced mentioned that they found very useful the exchange and they learned about new tools to implement in their quality assurance system. Based on the revised training, a program was developed that is available online for all EU schools or training centres. Like all the final products the training program options have been published on the website www.qual4t-project.org free for use. But also through the EACEA disseminiation platform, European schoolgateway and websites as EQAVET and EfVET the project products can be found. Evaluation The project meetings and the project process and products were all evaluated with the aim to further improve after reflection of the previous period. One partner testimonial in the latest evaluation: "In this final semester of the project it is possible to reflect on the reactions of the target group. It is difficult to score the Quality guide, as this guide is integrated in the explanation of the three themes of the Qualty tools. The tools are the real documents that teams use, and with the explanation of the guide the combination is very effective. This is the same for the Story Book, being a red line in workshops, integrating tools where needed, depending on the target groups. In the end, we always return to the office empty handed, while we took extra hard copies with us to workshops… Impact In all partner organisations a sustainable impact has shown. Besided this, also expected impact is shown on national level. The seven Multiplier Events prommiss good mainstreaming after the project life time and a new transnational training has been planned for 2020! Altogether QUAL4T2 project helped to make VET a bit more attractive!