An academic from the University of Winchester has been instrumental in the formation of new professional standards for further education (FE) teachers and work-based learning (WBL) practitioners in Wales.
Professor Bill Lucas, Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester and Chair of the Working Group for the project, led the development of the new standards with a working group of representatives from FE and WBL groups.
The new standards, which were developed for the Welsh Government, sets high expectations for post-16 education providers, providing a framework for progression and a tool for developing institutional strategies to improve teaching and learning. They also reflect the importance of ongoing professional learning for staff and the role vocational learning plays in creating the skilled, innovative and adaptive workforce Wales needs.
“Practitioners in higher and further education have a really important role in creating a just, socially cohesive and profitable society,” Bill Lucas said, “A decade has passed since the original FE professional standards were last subject to a formal review and much has changed since then. These new standards have been developed collaboratively, over a period of nine months, by an expert group of practitioners and policy makers through a series of workshops. The document is now shorter, simpler and much more accessible and offers a set of standards that can be truly owned by the sector for whom they are designed.”
Practitioners and employers are now encouraged to use these professional standards to support professional learning within their current professional development systems and processes.
Bill Lucas concluded: “I hope that Wales will see itself at the forefront of thinking about what it is to be a WBL or FE practitioner in this important part of the new millennium.”
The guidelines can be accessed online here.