One can hardly imagine building a house without prior planning and the same applies to quality in VET. People make plans before they act and in VET institutions planning is an everyday process. One has to plan distribution of subjects, deployment of teachers and use of teaching materials, as well as assessments of students and graduation ceremonies.

But planning quality means strategic planning, which is more than finding short-term solutions or correcting errors that have occurred. Strategic planning is about improving the whole organisation and in particular its core process of teaching and learning. Last but not least, planning quality means developing a strategy for quality management.

A strategy must provide answers to the following questions:

1. what should be achieved;

2. how can it be achieved, by whom, by when;

3. what resources are needed.

Therefore, a VET institution has to define its strategic objectives, activities and resources. Consequently, strategic planning can be understood as development of a coherent plan to achieve the institution’s self-defined objectives with appropriately defined resources and by systematic alignment of activities towards these objectives.

Box 6. Proposals of the EQAVET recommendation

Since VET institutions are complex organisations, they will rarely have just one objective. This is why in strategic planning a hierarchy of objectives is established (see annex, Sections 1.1, 1.2, 1.29). At the top there is a general and commonly-shared principle, a vision of the future role of the organisation, which is mostly kept deliberately vague, and in Chapter 6 you will learn more about the vision’s importance and how to build and shape it. At the current stage, dealing with strategic planning, it is more important to look more closely at operational issues, because there are several additional steps to be planned to ensure achievement of the strategic objectives.

Strategic planning in teaching and learning could look like the following example (see Figure 4): the overall objective is to modernise the learning process and sub-objectives are to strengthen self-learning and use of eLearning/open-educational resources. Teachers and trainers must develop and provide tasks and instructions for self-learning and suitable material for eLearning through corresponding activities.

Figure 4. An example of strategic planning

Source: CEDEFOP.

Concerning eLearning/open-educational resources, a learning platform and additional equipment are the resources needed. In addition, teachers and trainers must be entitled to allocate a certain percentage of their working time for preparing themselves and further training might be offered to them so they are able to perform their new tasks professionally. Necessary time for this could be made available by giving up other tasks they perform, such as providing cover for other teachers or carrying out clerical and administrative activities.

To determine at a later stage whether the strategic objectives have been achieved, they must be realistic and sufficiently specific. Setting targets helps to stay realistic. For example, setting targets would mean defining a realistic number of VET courses per department and determining for each course a realistic percentage of self-learning and, where appropriate, of using elearning/ open educational resources.

In subsequent stages of strategic planning, departments should designate individual teachers to take on the tasks, thus defining clear personal responsibilities. Further, milestones and deadlines have to be fixed: what progress should be achieved after a month, three months, or half a school year? But it is important to differentiate, as mile stones and deadlines might be different for different departments or VET programmes.

The quality management department should be responsible for the following steps in strategic planning. First, it must define appropriate indicators for monitoring the process and the results. In the example above the number of teachers who have completed further training can be monitored as a process indicator and the number of tasks for self-learning developed could be used as a result indicator. In addition, the quality department must determine how monitoring processes and assessment of results is organised and what measurement tools could be used, to evaluate whether the tasks and instructions for self-learning developed are suitable and appreciated by students/learners.

Box 7. Indicators

Involving stakeholders in planning and developing quality in your institution is of vital importance, although intensity of their participation should be different in various areas with respect to their individual concerns and responsibilities (see Table 1 and annex, Section 1.37). It is obvious that teachers and trainers are the most important actors for quality in teaching and learning, but senior management and students/learners should also have a voice and a significant role since they are directly affected by the planned objectives. External stakeholders should contribute to planning teaching and learning with their experience in an advisory role, while quality management should have a supporting function by defining appropriate indicators and tools for monitoring and assessing the envisaged quality objectives. Quality management’s role is a supportive one also in the developing quality of organisational processes phase, while it is decisive in constructing an effective QMS within the institution. The senior management team should contribute through its proactive attitude to all areas, but is responsible for quality in overall management of the organisation.

Table 1. Intensity of involvement of stakeholders in different areas of quality development

Source: CEDEFOP.

An overview of the different steps in the strategic planning process and how these steps subsequently build on one another is given in Figure 5. It must be underlined that the whole planning stage needs to be accompanied by continuous communication and coordination between the various stakeholders, which should be organised by the quality department under responsibility of senior management. In later chapters you will learn more about how to organise stakeholders’ involvement in operational terms.

Figure 5. Main steps in the strategic planning process

Source: CEDEFOP.

Strategic quality planning is usually undertaken in a long-term, multi-annual perspective, but is reviewed and adapted once a year in light of progress made, mostly in combination with preparation of the annual course programme. Achievement of quality milestones, however, can be monitored more frequently, quite often in parallel with implementation of activities leading to it. In Section 3.2 you will learn more about real-time monitoring of your activities.

Box 8. Questions for reflection and options for further action