This KA2 project Professionalism of Vocational English Teachers (PROFVET) is a natural development of the partner organisations' co-operation under KA1. Genius Solutions (trading as Languages Training & Development), a language teaching and teacher training company has been sending mobility participants to Hungary since 2014. This project, Collaboration to Assist in Vocational English (CAVE) is now in its fourth iteration. In the most recent iteration a new Italian partner, MyES Firenze SRL was added. CAVE 4 sends trainee teachers from the UK on a short two-week work placement in Szekszard, Hungary at the premises of a vocational college. There they take over from the local teacher of English while they develop their teaching skills. The Italian partner receives trainee teachers longer -term under ErasmusPro. These teachers assist at schools in several centres across Italy. Both teachers at these receiving organisations and their management have expressed interest in the training programmes that Genius Solutions offers for their long-term staff. This project seeks to allow that to happen, during transnational visits by; -introducing the specific context of each partner to the others, -allowing the partners to watch each others long-term teachers in action, The result will be a series of transnational training events, hosted and run by Genius Solutions in the UK. These will be based upon the requirements and criteria of an internationally recognised qualification (the Trinity College London Level 7 Diploma in TESOL) though take into account the diverse contexts and specific requirements of the three partners. In all, 36 teachers will attend the training sessions to be held in Summer 2021, 2022 and 2023. They will work on additional tasks for their Diploma in TESOL during the remainder of the year, embedding new skills and learning into their teaching. The results will be an upskilled workforce with the confidence to autonomously design plans, materials and lessons to more closely fit the needs of vocational learners with the result of more effective language use in vocational contexts in the longer term.
The objectives of transnational visits was: 1) For management from the organisations to be formally introduced, the Italian and Hungarian partners not knowing each other. 2) For management to view live teaching at the various institutions in order to get a feel for teaching approaches used at three very different types of establishment, with three diverse learner profiles: (Adult ESOL leaners in the UK [migrant workers, refugees, multilingual, integrative motivation, English/employability/citizenship as subjects of study), (Adult learners in Italy [largely instrumentally motivated for vocational reasons or intrinsically motivated as retirees etc , largely monolingual, but with some non-Italian speakers, e.g migrants, English sole subject of study]), (Teenagers and young adults in Hungary [state school context, English delivered as part of the larger academic/vocational curriculum in only a few hours per week. Extrinsically motivated by Hungarian national curriculum and prescribed material approved by Hungarian Ministry of Education. Universally monolingual context). In order to place the context of the project: These were supplemented by guided training CPD sessions to share practices among teachers from these institutions.
The project was arranged between the applicant organisation, one partner an historical receiving organisation under Erasmus+ KA1 projects and the other partner an educational institution with whom the applicant had built up a relationship, though had not, at inception formally hosted KA1 participants, but had expressed an interest to do so. The need addressed was to share practice between institutions as each has its own approach to delivery of English Language teaching and teachers would benefit from being exposed to other views and ideas from which they could select to adopt as they saw fit. The idea being the promotion of principled eclecticism through CPD. The applicant, Genius Solutions Limited t/a Languages Training and Development acted as Lead Organisation, given its previous direct experience with Erasmus+.