British Council continues workshops to help build confidence in Yemeni vocational education

In order to build long-term confidence among students and employers in the quality of the Yemen’s vocational education system, a leading UK expert, Alison Muggridge, is helping key individuals who are involved in the technical and vocational education in Yemen. Muggridge is spearheading a series of two-day workshops put on by the British Council and organized in partnership with the Ministry of Technical Education and Vocational Training (MOTEVT).
 

The workshops began on October 25th and will continue until October 29th. Over 40 delegates from the MOTEVT’s new Quality Inspections Department, as well as a number of quality control administrators for vocational education and training institutions from across Yemen, will focus on driving forward with the improvements for the overall inspection system, which has been established to ensure a strong quality inspection system for the entire country.
 

These current workshops build on the support previously given to the MOTEVT by the British Council, and are part of the Council’s larger Skills for Employability Program. This program’s purpose is to ensure that young people in Yemen have the right skills to compete successfully for jobs in the national and international marketplace and that employers can have  confidence that the young people they recruit have qualifications of value.
 

Muggridge has over 20 years of experience working in education, beginning at the practitioner level and continuing all the way up to senior management.  In all of her roles she has taken a key interest in quality and raising the standards for students and the educational institutions.  In her most recent full-time role as a Quality Director, Alison was able to utilize her experience with raising standards and external inspections to assist her organization in achieving  “outstanding” marks for “quality assurance” and “equality and diversity.” She has more recently been accepted as a part-time Ofsted inspector, which involves visiting colleges across the UK to assess their performance and highlighting key areas for their improvement.  
 

Concerning the Skills for Employability Program, Melanie Relton, the Regional Manager for the British Council, explained that “high quality vocational education qualifications that are internationally benchmarked give students and employers confidence that they have the right skills to be successful in the marketplace.” She added that high standards for Quality Assurance and a precise inspection framework are at the heart of the educational quality issue.
 

Speaking for the Ministry of Technical Education and Vocational Training, Deputy Minister Dr. Ebtihag al-Kamal said, “the ministry is determined to make improvements in its different departments. We are working hard to identify the right partners who can help in making this change. Part of the ministry’s agenda is to start with inspection, which has a greater impact for improvement in all the other departments and this is actually where we have begun.”
 

The Project Manager at the British Council, Nawaf Shamsan, said that the British Council is intent on working with the ministry to make positive changes to the overall vocational system. Shamsan added, “the British Council is an international leader in the vocational sector and therefore we are confident that changes will be made with the ministry’s support in the near future.”
 

“This is just part of the British Council’s goals for the Middle East with our Skills for Employability Program: to share UK expertise in support of governments’ education reform programs,” Shamsan stated. “Providing opportunities to exchange knowledge and ideas like this will also help build trust and understanding between different societies,” he added.

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