About
The aim of the English and New Competencies for Ukrainian Reformed School Education (ENCOURSE) project is to empower English language school teachers to meet the requirements of the New Ukrainian School (NUS) reform, utilize the new Upper Secondary School Standards, and introduce practical approach to development of mediation skills in teaching and learning of English as a foreign language.
Supporting role
The reform of Upper Secondary School education is a final stage of the large-scale NUS education reform, in which the British Council has played a supporting role since 2018. We stepped in and together with our partners trained 17,000 primary school English teachers in 2018. Between 2021 and 2024, more than 12,000 English teachers of basic secondary school completed professional development courses on the British Council Online Teacher Community platform.
New initiative
Our new initiative, the ENCOURSE teacher professional development course aims to address the needs for professional development of teachers in Upper Secondary School. The ENCOURSE is contextualized with Ukraine’s situation as has been developed both with help of the UK expertise in English language teaching and input from the Ukrainian context.
The course content is based on the combination of mediation competencies, learner-centred and communicative learning and includes extensive opportunities for learning and development, practicing, and reflecting.
Essentially, learners play an active role in teacher development on this course. At a specific stage of the course, learners are involved in experimenting and gaining new learning experience in their classrooms which, in its turn, helps teachers better reflect and develop.
Implementation
The British Council piloted the course in November 2024 with two groups of teachers from Dnipro and Vinnytsia. According to the pilot results, the course was positively perceived by both teachers and their learners.
Since the pilot, the British Council has already delivered ENCOURSE to 400 teachers. The training took place both in person and online, depending on the security situation in the region, and was split into two Cohorts, conducted in February-March and April-May 2025, respectively.