VET Education: Increase personal and pedagogical competences with the EXCELLENCE BOOST!  

The EXCELENCE BOOST! project is funded by the EU and aims to increase the personal and pedagogical competences of VET teachers/trainers, as well as to build the culture of excellence both at personal and organisational level in their VET schools. This project is coordinated by Portugal and brings together 3 European and 4 African partners.

The project aims to provide teachers and trainers with opportunities to develop and maintain their technical, pedagogical and transversal (e.g. digital, intercultural communication) skills at the highest level, as well as to network and exchange experiences with other professionals from different parts of the world (in this case Europe and Africa).

Teachers' mobility is a very important aspect of their personal development. Furthermore, schools and all educational organisations, including the private sector, are facing crucial challenges and changes, namely:

• Educators need a multigrade understanding of students' needs
• Educators are facing digitisation and digital transformation
• Educators need to improve leadership/management skills
• Mental health issues for educators and students is very important 
• Educators face the needs for inclusion and diversity awareness in the context of globalisation 
• Educators face organisational challenges and changes at institutional level where they need constant updating.

Overall, EXCELENCE BOOST!  is a 2-year project which aims to develop a lifelong learning pathway for VET trainers/teachers, so that teachers can more easily understand their professional path for lifelong development and also to develop a learning sharing platform for innovative VET schools and organisations. The target audience is HEIs, VET teachers/trainers, VET school directors, etc.

The first working meeting was held  in Dar es Salaam-Tanzania on 23^th-24^th February 2023 and in this working meeting the partners reflected, analysed and defined all the methods and strategies to be used to achieve the objectives as well as the success of the project.

The project has two learning/training activities that take 5 days each. The first learning/training activity will take place in South Africa (28 August - 1 September 2023) while the second training will take place in Nigeria (27 November - 1 December 2023).

The project involves the organisation of local capacity building activities such as learning/sharing events and e-learning experimentation as well as 3 regular online learning/sharing roundtables and job shadowing activities in Latvia and Slovakia.