In a bid to raise the bar for Indonesia’s workforce, the British Council-Indonesia partnered with HSBC and recently launched a character-building programme for teachers, principals, high school students and vocational schools.
The initiative called “Global Education: Building an Intelligent Young Generation with Character” launched early this week and is set to run until the last quarter of the year. Supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture, the programme involves the cooperation of six schools from Bandung, West Java, and six others from Jakarta.
Director of the British Council-Indonesia Paul Smith told reporters Indonesia will benefit from global education initiative and that it will enable young people with professional goals to learn new skills and hone the knowledge required to jump-start their careers.
The British Council director is also hopeful that the programme will enable the country’s young workforce to become more competitive in the ASEAN Economic Community. Smith believes that the programme will equip them with 21st-century skills to be well-prepared when competing with their rivals on a global level.
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The character-building programme aims to provide training for both students and educators alike – skills such as social responsibility, critical thinking, digital literacy and leadership – with an aim of 1,800 fully trained teachers by the end of the year.
Smith emphasized that educating teachers is important because they have the ability to train more students as “the knowledge is passed on.”
It’s also no surprise that the education and culture ministry are in favour of the programme, as it is in sync with the country’s educational development strategy, which involves the improvement of access to and quality of skills. In theory, this is designed to empowering major education actors and encouraging public participation in improving the country’s education framework.
The ministry’s senior advisor for competitiveness and innovation, Ananto Kusuma Seta claimed that one of the significant points of the programme is that it will not be a temporary project. The results of the programme will be compiled in a training module that will later be pushed for implementation in other local schools.
Seta added that learning new languages can help enhance young people’s awareness about other cultures and encourage them to become more open-minded and respectful towards differences. Local students, according to the senior advisor, should also be aware of the changing career trends that are essential for their future.
Image credits: EducationNews, Kompas
