Website: www.qual4t-project.org

Coordinator: Landstede Group, NL

Contact Details: Margrieta Kroese, coordinator

Starting / Ending Date: 1-11-2013 / 31-10-2015

Summary: Are you the teacher that wants to improve quality of education for better results for your students? Or are you the quality staff member wanting to improve quality culture in your team or school? Follow our project! Our products are best practices or specially designed to bridge a gap, and… for direct use for all days quality improvement in Vocational and Adult education!

With the QUAL4T project seven European partners aim to provide teachers and trainers good materials to help them with improving quality in education.
We aim:
To provide a toolkit and a practical guide/ method in six languages, with ready to use instruments for teachers, trainers, quality staff and mentors To develop a quality improvement culture, where teachers and trainers are active players To transfer quality instruments and best practices To connect management and teachers through the management brochure

Can we use the materials for free?
Yes! No matter if you are teacher / trainer, quality staff member or management, you can start using our materials in school year 2014/2015 (after we finished the research phase and designed the products). And an update will be published after piloting and consulting our target group: teachers/trainers from our own organizations.

Background
Although we already have good quality systems in our educational organizations, we concluded that still not all teachers seem to be fully engaged. When asked, teachers for instant state that it is hard for them to feel (and get) involved in quality subjects and indicators that they have no influence upon. By involving them in what they DO feel that they can influence addressing their professional skills, by changing paper into action, by focusing on teaching and learning process and building toolbox instruments that they can straight use for quality improvement. But mostly by involving them and evaluating with them, we want to improve a positive attitude. From our experience of last year we know this method works!

As the project aims to bring quality to the teachers/ trainers, we will involve this direct target group as effective as possible! The input for the designing of the products and the evaluation of the pilots will be strong indicators for this.

Transfer
Within our project we will use the Recommendations of the QALLL project and the recommendations of representatives from European vocational education and adult training.

The QALLL project that we use for transfer has just ended (November 2012). All participating National Agencies gathered last years’ finished projects from their countries subjecting quality. These are carefully compared and a report has been made. as a final outcome the consortium gave their recommendations for future European work in the field of Quality Assurance and Improvement.
Our project aims to start with a selection of those recommendations, and therefore is innovative, without re-inventing the wheel. In our turn, we aim to disseminate and when possible exploit our project products amongst EU National Agencies.

The outcomes of QUAL4T can be used in all sectors, EQF-levels and curricula of professional education.
We aim to implement the products that we base on the recommendations of the QALLL project (coordinated by Austrian NA, and with NL, DE and IT as partners) in The Netherlands, but consortium partners also want to implement the outcomes. In fact we will share best practices, and rewrite them where possible for use in our institutes, countries and also other Member States.
We believe that the outcomes can also be used in other educational sectors as in fact Quality Assurance is an important factor in all education systems. Meaning that the products can be of use for Universities and Adult Education and maybe some of them in Secondary and Primary education too.

European value
Nowadays quality improvement in professional education is a main issue. In The Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom approaches to Quality Assurance are in line with the EQAVET Reference Framework, and Spain is preparing this approach.

Nevertheless we know that we are not yet finished. There is more work to be done, as in the 2012 EQAVET survey is concluded that both teachers and students in only 50% of all countries are ‘always or sometimes’ involved in the development of the national Quality Assurance approaches. And it is THESE teachers that are our main target group and these students that we aim to involve in QA.

In 14 European Member States a research took place through the QALLL project, that ended November 2012. Project partner countries were involved in this too. Professionalization, dissemination of tools, investment in quality culture and involvement of stakeholders (teachers, students, work field) are in the top 10 of their recommendations for the coming years.

The QUAL4T project is coordinated by Landstede Group NL and funded by the European Commission through the Leonardo da Vinci (TOI) Grant program and runs from 1 November 2013 till 31 October 2015.
Comments: You can follow the project by subscribing for the newsletterson the website, or follow us on facebook.

Email: adejong@landstede.nl

Founding Agency: Leonardo da Vinci TOI, Dutch National Agency

Partners: ES, UK, EL, DE, IT, NL2