User:Kdammers/New Era International Laboratory School

New Era International Laboratory School is one of three special Mongolian junior-senior high schools created in Ulaanbaatar in the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. These magnet schools are ...  November 2010  MESC.

Name of Host Organisation (HO):               Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (MECS)

Name of Australian Partner Organisation (APO):

Assignment Location:               Ulaanbaatar,                Mongolia

Assignment Duration:               18 months

Proposed Start:               1 May 2012

Host Organisation Description:

The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (MECS) has begun implementing education standard reforms which are in line with the Cambridge International Qualifications. The New Era School, established in November 2010, is the first State Bilingual International Laboratory School which is practising Cambridge qualifications and will pursue a bilingual education program, and is the first of 30 planned laboratory schools. New Era is a pilot school, where standards and curriculum will be tested and refined. It will act as a model school and training centre where provincial and district level in-service teacher training will be conducted in order to prepare teachers for the national rollout of new standards and curriculum. New Era will also be a foundation for the introduction of bilingual education system in Mongolia. There are 16 teachers, 5 workers and 80 students at New Era as of September, 2011.

Assignment Summary:

To successfully attain the new Cambridge International Examination (CIE) standards, the New Era State Laboratory school needs to ensure that its curriculum corresponds to the goals and objectives of the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE). This will involve reforming the school’s teaching methodologies to enable student-centric learning when it is appropriate. The Teacher Trainer will be based at the New Era school and will work closely with six teachers across three Bilingual Schools in Ulaanbaatar to improve the local teachers’ English proficiency within their field of education. The volunteer will assist local counterparts in lesson preparations, will provide demonstrations, and will conduct teacher trainings and workshops based on the capacity building needs of local teachers. These objectives will be based on the appropriate IGCSE syllabus and Student Revision Checklist for each class. The volunteer will also observe the manner in which classes are currently being taught and will offer appropriate in-class assistance as necessary.

CAMBRIDGE SCHOOLS: The internationalisation of the school system is not limited to the private sector. In 2010 the public New Era High School in Ulaanbaatar opened its doors as the first “laboratory school” in the country. Laboratory schools are state-run bilingual institutions, which offer instruction in both English and Mongolian and follow the syllabus of Cambridge International Examinations (CIE), an organisation owned by the UK’s University of Cambridge. Around 30 laboratory schools will be established by 2014, one in each aimag, or province, and district of Ulaanbaatar. The government is in the process of identifying which institutions will become laboratory schools and is recruiting and training the most able teachers to staff them. These are intended as pace-setting establishments, as well as pilot projects – if successful, the bilingual system and CIE syllabus could be rolled out to the entire nationwide school system.

“The laboratory schools will allow broader access to international universities,” Lonjid said. “They will help bring standards up to international levels and could set the course for the development of a bilingual school system, though these are still early days.”

OUTLOOK: While Mongolia’s education sector has come a long way since 1990, it is still encountering issues that affect many developing countries, including unequal access to schooling and patchy infrastructure. With the government committed to making substantial investments in the sector, and the support of international organisations, these issues are being addressed with generally good results. The next stage of educational development will involve increasing internationalisation, both in the form of new private schools and now in the form of the laboratory schools programme. Mongolia’s commitment to education is therefore reflected both through its investments and through its openness to new ideas and models of best practice.

http://www.oxfordbusinessgroup.com/news/access-and-opportunity-decentralisation-efforts-and-private-sector-involvement