Education project in South Africa: funding promise for training vocational school teachers

Trainme is a project run by the Industry-wide Training Centre of East Bavaria (ÜBZO) to train and continually educate South African vocational school teachers, and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to the tune of 393,647 Euro altogether.

Project leaders Sonja Prüll and Carina Adam travelled from Weiherhammer, Germany, to Pretoria, South Africa, to attend a working group alongside representatives from the German and South African education ministries (BMBF and DHET), together with other stakeholders, as part of joint German-South African efforts to internationalise vocational education and training.

Trainme (modular training and education of South African TVET lecturers in mechanical and electrical engineering; TVET: technical and vocational education and training) has been set up as a three-year joint project aiming to further develop the training and continuing education given to South African vocational school teachers (and based on the tried-and-tested German dual system) in a way that is targeted to that specific audience.

The foundation for this has to be close cooperation between government institutions, vocational education institutions and companies in both Germany and South Africa. To that end, the ÜBZO is collaborating with the Institute of Education (IfE) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, to develop and trial a modular curriculum for vocational school teachers who are either already working or still doing their training.

Over the course of the project, the idea is for the teachers to continually hone their specialist, subject-specific and general teaching skills, and come up with teaching and learning concepts (some of which will be guided) that they will then put into practice and reflect upon scientifically. They will also improve their technical skills in the context of the equipment and learning infrastructure available in the country. The ÜBZO project will focus on the subject-specific practical and the manual technical content of the training and continuing education modules covered in the mechanical and electrical engineering vocational courses.

ÜBZO Director Professor Dr. Erich Bauer is certain that the experience gained in the South Africa project will also be useful when it comes to training Chinese vocational school teachers and training staff: "As part of our strategy to internationalise vocational education and training, the ÜBZO wants to export the dual training system from Germany to China. In our role as a training provider, we will therefore be able to support our former parent company BHS Corrugated Maschinen- und Anlagenbau GmbH and other businesses in establishing vocational education and training programmes based on the German model at company sites all over the world."


Source: oberpfalzecho.de (article in the German newspaper Oberpfalzecho), revised by iMOVE, August 2018