It has
been a long time since I updated this blog, in the scheme of life and other
writing commitments, priorities have to be taken, and a new book with CABI (Entertainment Management: Towards Best Practice) that I am
providing several chapters for as well as co-editing chapters from other
contributors with my former colleague Dr Ben Walmsley (now at the University of
Leeds), has for the past 12 months taken over most of my other writing and
research commitments.
I am however, taking a
short break from that to make a plea on behalf of a superb educational
institution located in the beautiful baroque city of Dresden, in the state of
Saxony in the East of Germany. If you are unsure as to where Dresden is, then
Google Maps can certainly show you, but as a rough guideline, it is roughly
equidistant between the German capital city of Berlin, and the Czech capital
city of Prague, and has both road and rail links to both cities. Dresden also
has an excellent international airport.
Since 2006 I have been
working with a vocational business school in Dresden called Europäische
Wirtschafts Und Sprachenakademie Dresden, which is abbreviated to ‘EWS Dresden’, and is part of a larger EWS Group of colleges, who are a collective
of private vocational business and language schools with branches in several
German cities, including Dresden, Leipzig, Köln and Rostock, historically going
back to 1908. The Dresden branch has been in operation since 1991.
EWS Dresden is located
adjacent to Dresden Neustadt railway station within the area of central Dresden
known as the Neustadt or ‘new town’. The school specialises in teaching vocational
courses including Events Management, Office and Administration Management,
Business and Management, Project Management and Marketing Management. Students
at the school participate in 2 ½ year courses, (which includes a substantive
work placement), successful completion of their course entitles the students to
a ‘State Certificate’. At Leeds Metropolitan University, we have mapped the
learning outcomes, course content and student assessment of the state
certificate against our own curriculum, and have found them to be equivalent to
Higher Education levels 4 and 5 – in other words, equivalent to either a HigherNational Diploma (HND) or a Foundation Degree (FD). Many students learn
languages alongside their chosen courses, and through my own experience of
teaching at EWS, many students are multi-lingual. English is taught to the equivalent
of IELTS Level 5.
The school has a
specialist and dedicated staff team including academic, management and support
staff, excellent buildings with teaching rooms that are as good as any
university I have been to, a very modern IT setup, and strict rules around
attendance. The net result of this is that the school produces highly
proficient students who go on to become, valued members of society both in
Germany and around the world. At Leeds Metropolitan University we have a
progression agreement with EWS Dresden (along with other EWS branches), which
allows their graduates to ‘top-up’ at level 6, on selected Degree courses, to
get a Bachelor’s Degree. Historically these have allowed EWS students to
‘top-up’ on various Business and Language degrees, various Events Management
degrees and the BA (Hons) Entertainment Management, (specifically for those
students who have studied Events Management at EWS). The general standard of
work produced by EWS top-up students at Leeds Metropolitan University, has been
higher than the average student body, with the majority of EWS top-up students
achieving good first class honours (1st) or high upper seconds
(2:1).
Typical EWS Dresden class room
For the past 4 years,
EWS Dresden students have organised a major international conference called the
‘EWS Congress’, to which several hundred students from various EWS branches, as
well as students from other European educational institutions, particularly the
Katholieke Hogeschool Limburg (KHLim) attend. The conferences have included a
number of speakers from both education and industry, and I have had the
privilege to participate in these conferences on three occasions. I can confirm
that these student organised conferences have been absolutely as professional
as any conference which I have ever attended – this is testimony to both the
calibre and discipline instilled within the student body, as well as the
mentoring of students by dedicated and specialist EWS staff.
My reason for making
this post, and singing the praises of EWS Dresden, it’s staff, programmes and
students is that due to political reasons, which are outside of the control of
EWS Dresden and indeed every other private business school or college in the
German state of Saxony. Is that EWS Dresden and every other Saxon private vocational
school is faced with closure, due to a change in political will of the Saxon
government, who are withdrawing funding to such institutions from 2014.
The Saxon government,
has a seemingly unrealistic vision of how vocational courses should be structured
in terms of the balance of formal educational and work experience elements,
making it virtually impossible for vocational schools to adhere to the Saxon
ideal of roughly 50% study and 50% work throughout the course. Work placements
by their very nature are often ad-hoc, many are seasonal and a number are
dependent on events taking place at particular times of year, therefore
maintaining a continual 50 / 50 balance throughout the year is virtually
impossible for a number of vocational schools to realistically manage.
One ugly truth is that
there is a need for more lower skilled workers in Saxony, so removing
vocational courses and encouraging more teenagers to take low-skilled, low-paid
jobs instead of continuing in education will help fill a shortage of
low-skilled workers in the East of Germany. This is of course an unsustainable
stance for the Saxon government to take, and will lead to a future skills
shortage in this region. Another ugly truth is that there is an inherenet
snobbery in ‘the German establishment’ around the value of vocational courses
against more traditional university disciplines, despite indications that suggest students who participate in vocational degrees particularly with work placements, are more likely to prosper in
their future jobs and careers, than those who take un-vocational ‘classic’
courses of study, see here.
So who can help EWS
Dresden? Do you represent or know of a University ANYWHERE in the world, who
has ambitions to expand into the German educational market? Would your
university or another university benefit from opening a ‘branch’ or school
within Dresden? The staff at EWS Dresden would be eminently capable of
delivering a range of vocational educational courses to the specifications
required by another university, certainly up to Higher Education level 5 and even
beyond up to full Bachelors Degree level or further.
A model currently employed
at Prague College in the Czech Republic, is that the college wholly delivers a
range of qualifications on behalf of Teeside University, in the UK, and for
tuition fees which are considerably less than what they are in the UK, in
effect becoming a Czech branch of Teeside University. Would your university, or
another university that you are aware of benefit from such a partnership using
the ready-made facilities that are already in place at EWS Dresden?
If you are interested
in exploring such a partnership, please contact me either through this blog, or
at stuart-moss@lineone.net , and I will gladly put you in contact with
the School’s management team.
This School really does deserve to continue, and could in future become a valued partner to (or part of) a
vocational higher education institution who has ambitions to expand into the German Higher Education market, or the European Higher Education Market.
