Supporting the mobility of teachers and trainers in further education and skills

 

As employers, you know recruiting the best teachers and trainers is business critical. When they have unfamiliar qualifications from other EU countries, you need to understand what have been the features of their preparation to teach.

As teachers and trainers, being able to see how your teaching qualification stands compared to the main qualification accepted for practice in the country of your choice can have a positive impact both on how you view mobility and your confidence in your ability to transfer your practice.

To facilitate this, Standards Verification UK has developed the Comparison Tool (opens in new window) that sets out details of teacher/trainer qualifications gained in other European nations and some overseas countries to make them transparent and recognisable.

This can help:

• employers understand the development needs of prospective employees with initial teaching/training qualifications gained in other European countries;
• teachers/trainers carry out a gap analysis and plan any continuing professional development to ensure they can meet the expectations of practice in England;
• teacher educators to assess possible exemptions and credit transfer for students wishing to gain further ITT qualifications.

Currently, due to the given scope by the sponsors and restricted funding, the tool is limited in the number of qualifications included and the amount of useful information to help users make valid assessments. It is also a comparison to England only. Our experience of working with our customers – employers, teacher educators and members of the FE workforce - has indicated that this is a much needed tool and further development and wider scope would be valued by the sector.

In order to support a proposal for funding to the EC Lifelong Learning Programme, we are seeking your views on the value and need of the Comparison Tool together with backing for further development.

We have developed a short questionnaire for employers, teacher educators, and teachers/trainers. We would appreciate your time in completing the relevant section of the following short survey and your help in distributing it to others.

Please complete and submit this questionnaire by 10th Feb 2011 (extended).

For further information please email: Sandie Gay