Don Bosco VET School

In short: Don Bosco VET school is a Vocational Education and Training (VET) Center based in the Basque Country, Spain. The School uses the Skills Evaluation Tool of TKNIKA SET to assess and feedback on entrepreneurial skills, which contribute a percentage of the students’ final grade.

Age group: >16 years

Initial challenges: A vocational education and training center’s target is to create value for the student and to achieve employability for the student body in the labour market. Potential employing companies expressed the necessity for the students to develop entrepreneurial skills to increase the possibilities for labor integration and professional development.

What they did about it: Don Bosco has introduced active learning and teaching methodologies through the entrepreneurial skills development programs, substantially reducing the number of exams and traditional systems being used. The local business community is involved in the school where companies and entrepreneurs visit the school and suggest how the student body may collaborate in the solution of real entrepreneurial challenges. The students need to undertake entrepreneurship projects, providing solutions and added value to the companies involved. In addition, companies themselves visit the school when the process comes to an end to view and evaluate the solutions offered by the students. These entrepreneurship projects act to support the active learning and teaching methodology by helping to develop and assess the students’ entrepreneurial skills. For that purpose, the School has moved from using more general assessment tools to the SET tool by TKNIKA in every Basque Country center.

Results: After several years of applying real entrepreneurship projects to the students’ learning process, it can be said that Don Bosco has become an institution of reference for training students in entrepreneurial skills. The level of collaboration with the entrepreneurial network in the area, Guipuzcoa, has been reinforced and has allowed the creation of new projects. Also, the inclusion and the recognition obtained by the Center, students and projects, have been increased, both locally and internationally. The SET tool has been included in the evaluation, follow-up and development of entrepreneurial abilities, since it allows fast feedback and increased added value through the digital platforms offered in this skills-based model.

Relevance for entrepreneurial teaching: The use of the entrepreneurial abilities assessment through SET has allowed for the incorporation of Entrepreneurship Education in most of the School; it offers potentiality in assessment through self and peer assessments linked to efficient and fast feedback in the tutoring process.

Applied assessment methods and tools: The Skills Evaluation Tool (SET) can be integrated throughout the whole assessment process, alongside self-evaluation and peer assessment of students and teachers.

Contact information: Juan Carlos Lizarbe. E-mail: donbosco@fpdonbosco.com

Website: www.fpdonbosco.eus