News Volunteer Service Overseas (VSO) British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA)
Education sector supplier acceleration programme
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or 20 years, Diana Brand taught English and journalism at universities in Edinburgh and South Wales. At the end of her career, she went to a new university in Ethiopia as a VSO volunteer. Here she discusses how and why she did it at the age of 62.
Towards the end of my career, I got promoted into management. Getting back to classroom teaching was a big motivation for going to Ethiopia with VSO. I wish I’d volunteered overseas when I was younger – a friend did it when we were 18 – so after I’d retired I knew I wanted to do it. I did a TEFL course and taught refugees in Bristol. At first, the right opportunities overseas weren’t available, but I refused to give up. I was offered a one year placement at Mizan-Tepi University, in the West of Ethiopia. Like in the UK, students at the university were aged 18 and over and they had all completed an extra year at school in order to get in, so they were very committed to being there.
I think my biggest achievements during my placement were setting up a resource centre and an English club for students. The resource centre was a novel concept in Ethiopia, even at university level. Most classrooms contained very basic equipment. Students used pens, pencils and exercise books and occasionally had handouts. I filled the resource centre with books and DVDs, mostly brought over in my luggage from the UK.
The English club was a great success: the students were desperate to learn English, so I had them doing sketches, poems and songs. It was a lot of fun and helped improve their language skills. I was impressed with the resilience of these students and the staff; they would just keep on going through many difficulties. Most students stayed at the University for the whole year, as they couldn’t afford to go home in the holidays. I remember one student talking passionately about studying at university not for himself or for his family, but for his region. After graduation he planned to go back home to help improve the lives of people there. Along with my teaching skills, I think my accent was also a big asset to the English club! Students wanted to speak to me and I hope I helped them a lot. Also because of my accent I was asked to participate in promotional films. I did voiceovers for films to promote the local coffee plantations and the university outside Ethiopia.
Ethiopia was not what I had expected. My image of the country was formed by the 1984 famine and I did find poverty when I first arrived. My journey from the capital, Addis Ababa, to the university took two days along a very bad road. But I also found money coming into the area to improve the infrastructure: by the time I left, a new road had been built. There were more modern conveniences than I had expected - I had access to the internet and kept in contact with my family over the internet. I was also able to write a blog about my time in Ethiopia. I would definitely consider volunteering with VSO again – I learned so much about Ethiopia so I’d like to go and learn more about another country, possibly Nepal, where VSO has a long-established education programme.
As long as you realise that volunteering overseas won’t be easy all the time, and a measure of success is how many people you hope to influence, I would recommend it to anyone.
uVSO urgently needs education professionals to volunteer in countries all over the world. Visit
www.vso.org.uk/education for more information.
April 2014
he government has recently launched a scheme to support businesses targeting the education sector. Caroline Wright, director at the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), explains why this industry has been selected for funding and the benefit for UK schools. It all started back in 1996 when the English prime minster at the time, Tony Blair, stated his three main priorities for government: ‘education, education, education.’ The associated funding saw an unprecedented investment in technology and of course, demand led to increased
supply. New suppliers appeared into the market to meet the demand and those who provided high quality products, resources and services, resources flourished. As a result the UK started to lead the world in terms of education resource development.
Schools in the UK, more than anywhere else in the world had a huge range of resources to choose from. The challenge was finding the highest quality, most cost effective and appropriate resources for its specific needs. This is where the role of BESA, the schools’ trade association came in; advising schools on best practice procurement and supporting suppliers to create resources in line with school’s specific needs.
Despite the recent economic crisis, when looking at the various market segments, it was the education sector that continued to exhibit consistent growth.
The global education market is now estimated by UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) to be worth $4.5 trillion, and is set to rise to $6.5 by 2017, placing it second only to healthcare. When we look specifically at the UK’s place in this market, our dominance is clear; we lead the global education market in both exports and the reputation that we have for the quality of our products and resources, resulting in total exports for the whole UK education sector to be valued at more than £17.5bn and growing. It’s nice to see the UK lead the world in something! By recognising this global economic strength, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) has committed funding to support and nurture small to medium sized businesses targeting the education sector with the objective of developing our export trade further. While this is of course a great opportunity for these businesses and the UK economy, it is also good news for our schools. The one to one mentoring, access to high quality industry research, business training, market intelligence reports and briefing sessions with headteachers and curriculum subject experts to gain insights on schools’ resourcing needs, will undoubtedly result in higher quality products both internationally and in the UK.
Sitting behind this rapid development was BESA, offering the industry guidance to ensure the continued improvement of standards. BESA’s work with international governments and ministers from across the world also ensured UK businesses were able to take their UK success and develop it further overseas.
So if know of any small businesses with resources that you have used but could do with support to develop them further, please ask them to contact me or my colleague Mark at
caroline@besa.org.uk or,
markr@besa.org.uk.
uwww.besa.org.uk www.education-today.co.uk 7
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