Women leaders in Anglican education services wanted

The search is on for women education leaders to take part in the 2014 Commonwealth Professional Fellowship scheme being run by the Anglican Alliance.

The seven week course will include:

• an induction week in London with visits to the Office for Standards in Education, the UK’s Department for Education and a visit to Lambeth Palace.
• a bespoke day course at the Institute of Education on gender and development in education
• week placements with two London education authorities
• week placements with two diocesan education authorities
• school visits
• a bespoke week course at Nottingham University

A university lecturer in gender and development studies will be the facilitator working with the participants during the course.

The programme will be open to women who are either education administrators delivering education services for Anglican provinces or dioceses, or who are headteachers in substantial Anglican education institutions. They must be committed to continuing in the provision of education, and to improving the provision of church education services in their own countries. They will also need to leave their jobs and families for seven weeks to travel to the UK for the programme.

The programme is funded by the UK Government through the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. It is open to people from developing Commonwealth countries. For more information on this see the CSC website. Application is a competitive process assessed by set criteria, and the CSC has to approve both the details of the scheme and the participants nominated to take part for the funding to be provided.

This will be the third of the Commonwealth schemes run by the Anglican Alliance, and aims to focus specifically on the importance of women’s education in development. The Millenium Development Goals set women’s empowerment as a target, and the goals of reducing infant and maternal mortality are also strongly related to women’s educational attainments. Previous schemes have been for education and health administrators and have been very popular and effective.

If you are interested in the programme please email the alliance at anglicanalliance@aco.org for more details. The scheme will go live for applications later in the year.