SAETO - Self-Assessment for Educational and Training Organisations

 is a project funded by the European Commission under the LEONARDO DA VINCI Community Vocational Training Action Programme with the project No. LI-05-B-F-PP-164510.

SAETO will develop a quality framework for self-assessment which is focused on the special needs of small ETOs to serve the different customer groups such as internal and external trainers, teachers, apprentices or students. Moreover, SAETO will be supported with available methods & tools of Continuous Improvement Process. The end products of SAETO will be used as an input for an ETO specific knowledge base of the GOA-WorkBench. GOA-WorkBench is a support software for TQM implementations that has been developed as part of the European Research Programme and which is licensed by EFQM. This tool has already been used for the current electronic version of "Fit for Excellence" and supports also customer satisfaction surveys, thus facilitating self-assessments and feed-back of organisations as well as individual courses.

The methodology of technical adaptation which results in SAETO will follow the concept of rapid prototyping allowing a very early, hands on involvement of ETO as end users. The pedagogical aspects will follow the methodology of activating learning methods in the framework of a learning organisation approach and will utilise the potential provided by tools of ICT and eLearning. It takes into account that employees and the organisation as a whole are fostered to learn in order to improve their individual and organisational performance. Therefore, learning processes are conceived as processes based on existing experience and competence and oriented towards developing new competencies of coping with organisational and human resources development needs, using a blended learning approach open to all combinations of participative learning methods and instruments available to the specific provider organisation.

A multimedia tutorial will be developed to facilitate the implementation of the SAETO results by the ETO end users.

At the end of the project, a comprehensive tool of carrying out an easily understandable and economically viable self assessment process meeting the requirements of the official quality recognition scheme for ETOs will be available, thus lowering the previously existing implementation barriers substantially.

SAETO will be tested at four levels:

1. The developing partners will make alpha tests of the available solution as SAETO progresses. This will be supported by iterative tests of individual modules by the internal end users, following the rapid prototyping concept.

2. Early in the second project year, each of the partner ETOs will test the developed SAETO tools in a real life business case to run a self-assessment with the goal to define a status, to identify and implement improvement actions. The Experience from test level b will be input for improvements as well as the starting point for the test level c

3. Well before the end of the first project year, 15 additional test users will be involved in the improvement of the solution and in the last third of the project they will implement SAETO with the support of the partners. Their feedback will add a further and impartial point of view for the final fine tuning of the tools.

4. A second self-assessment will be done by the ETO partners in the last quarter of the project, with the goal of obtaining an ISO 9001 Certification or an official EFQM Recognition.
   During the second half of the project, numerous workshops will be held to valorise and disseminate the SAETO solution and results to other ETOs, including new regions, not covered by the already existing partnership.

Expected results:

• All ETOs within the consortium will have a formally recognised TQM system at the end of the project, including a validation concept for individual courses.

• Based on the self assessments, all ETOs will receive feedback from a team of Excellence Assessors endorsed by EFQM providing them with a roadmap for further advancements.

• A Case Study on all test cases will be published enabling other ETOs to set up their own quality system.

A method to train, implement and manage a self-assessment process for ETOs will be available.

• A branch specific method to train, implement and manage a continuous improvement process (CIP) for ETOs as well as a set of general applicable methods & tools to reach Excellence will be available.

• As set of TQM training modules and support tools answering the special demands of ETOs will be ready for commercialisation.

• At least 50 additional ETOs from the partner countries plus 2- 3 additional EC regions will have been introduced to the SAETO solution through direct presentation.

• 2.000 CDs with an introduction to the project's results will be distributed to European ETOs.