Advocacy skills are necessary for managers to better promote/disseminate their achievements and thereby making those achievements sustainable. This also applies to educational managers and leaders of WUs, who are currently cooperating with VVOB in the education programme.
Therefore, based on the needs of its operational partners, on 21-22 June, 2013 VVOB Vietnam organized a two-day workshop on Improving Skills in Advocacy in Education for 30 managers and middle managers from DOETs, TTIs and WUs. Preceding this workshop was a one day workshop where partners shared findings of an internal programme evaluation, improved their data analysis and interpretation skills and– and this was the reason to conduct the this workshop just before the 2 day advocacy workshop - reflected on using evidence collected through M&E for conveying advocacy messages.(The main findings of the internal evaluation on institutional development, professional development and awareness raising and impact in LS schools will be posted in an upcoming article.)
Through the 2 day "advocacy" workshop, VVOB partners improved their advocacy skills and developed a plan to highlight achievements and disseminate outcomes. Also, this has been an opportunity to further strengthen the collaboration among the three operational partners: DoET, TTI, WU.
The main contents of the workshop included(i) System of policies in education in Vietnam, (ii) Concept of advocacy and advocacy approach, (iii) Advocacy skills in general and in education in specific, (iv) Process of advocacy, and (v) Action plan by each partner. The action plan by DOET aims at introducing several modules among those jointly developed by VVOB and partners for Lower secondary schools into the compulsory in-service trainings for educational managers/teachers at Upper secondary schools. TTIs’ action plan focuses on integrating certain ATL modules into extra curriculum for students. The action plan of the WUs aims at improving the link among Education and Life club (as a proxy of parents), People’s Committee (as a proxy of the authorities and the community) and schools.
