Teaching for Success: our approach | British Council Sri Lanka

Teaching for Success helps transform the quality of teaching in primary and secondary schools. It exemplifies the British Council’s vision that all teachers in the world have high quality continuing professional development (CPD) opportunities that improve their own professional understanding and practice and their learners’ success. The approach is underpinned by the British Council Frameworks of Continuing Professional Development for teachers and teacher educators.

Partnership working

We work with governments, agencies and institutions to understand priorities and the needs of teachers and learners. We collaborate on the design of CPD programmes and systems which meet requirements and are matched to the local context. We work with other UK organisations to bring the widest range of expertise to each project and programme.

Our goal

Our goal is quality in the classroom, where teachers are competent, knowledgeable, highly motivated, committed to their profession and able to innovate and achieve the best for their learners.

The British Council brings its global professional expertise to create sustainable teacher development solutions which:

build local continuing professional development systems and the human resource to maintain them
meet identified teacher needs and government priorities
have a positive and lasting impact on quality in the classroom
manage the factors across the whole education system that impact on achieving the goals for teacher development and quality in the classroom
embed equality, diversity and inclusion at every level
make the most effective use of technology for learning.

Ensuring outcomes in the classroom

Teaching for Success uses the following approach to building effective continuing professional development systems to improve the quality of teaching:

What are our models of engagement?

Teaching for Success encompasses a variety of models of engagement designed to suit the varied needs of our partners and clients.

In Sri Lanka, our main focus to date has been on supporting governments and organisations in planning and implementing programmes with a view to collaboratively building capacity and sustainability within the system for the future. These can take a variety of forms, including cascade design, the support and training of Regional English Support Centre staff

Through the Teaching for Success approach, we:

enable our partners and clients to access high-quality consultancy services from the best of international expertise to give them insight into aspects of the education system and inform further decision-making.
provide effective training through licensing our teacher development materials: we train the trainers, conduct monitoring and evaluation and ensure quality of delivery.
support our partners with assessment and curriculum reform and policy review.
take a transformative whole systems approach to improving the provision of pre and or in-service teacher education.

How do we monitor and evaluate projects?

Monitoring and evaluation has a variety of purposes as highlighted below:

to ensure learning and improvement in both the planning, management and academic components of a large scale programme
to ensure opportunities for professional development are exploited
to ensure accountability of all stakeholders at all levels
to ensure data is generated to reliably demonstrate the impact of the intervention.

Once the objectives, potential outputs and outcomes of the project have been agreed and finalised in collaboration with the project stakeholders, we create a monitoring and evaluation plan to allow us to track progress. We then conduct a baseline study of current skills and teaching in relation to the project outcomes.

The purpose of the baseline study is to:

provide a picture of current practice
help us to design the specific content of the training programme
provide data which can be used as for comparative purposes at key milestones during the life of the project.

In order to evaluate the overall impact of the project, baseline, mid-project and post-project monitoring and evaluation is completed by British Council trainers and consultants. External evaluations are commissioned wherever possible, in consultation with our partners.