Why knowing how your adult education organisation performs in CPD matters

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IO1 – Scorecard and screening questionnaire on adult education providers’ performance in terms of the professional development of adult educators

What is it about?

This project result is a guidance and benchmarking tool that seeks to exploit the advantages of comparison, best practices and transfer of models and approaches.

We provide a quality monitoring tool for adult education providers’ performance concerning the continuing professional development of adult trainers.
With this tool, we want to contribute to developing a broad awareness and culture of quality and relevance in organisations engaged in adult education.

Why is it important?

There are several reasons why putting a stronger emphasis on CPD is essential. For one, the target group for adult education is becoming increasingly more diverse, including minorities, non-traditional learners, low-skilled learners and refugees.

Secondly, there is a paradigm shift in educational theory favouring a more active learning and learner responsibility and autonomy. The merging priorities in education are linked to enhancing creativity and innovation as personal traits and characteristics of the learning environment.

And last but not least, there is a consensus in Europe that high-quality education can be achieved by developing a skilled teaching workforce, notably through initial training, continuous professional development and mobility.

What is the benefit of doing the assessment?

The assessment helps each adult education provider identify those areas of its approach to CPD that need further evaluation and improvement.

We offer a checklist of the most successful approaches and institutional policies in CPD. Studying these will help adult education providers assess to what extent such guidelines and procedures are already present and developed in the institution or to what extent they could be implemented.
The tool will contribute to enabling and improving quality assurance in adult education by presenting a comprehensive overview of the “golden standard” in the CPD staff. Implementing these standards will contribute to the relevance and efficiency of the courses offered by adult education providers.

And unlike formal accreditation, it is a voluntary tool that will allow adult education providers to become aware of the benefits of improved policy on CPD and perform an honest self-assessment and benchmarking exercise without the pressure of penalties.