Creative Spark-Train the trainers

Armenian National Engineering Laboratories (ANEL) of National Polytechnic University of Armenia (NPUA) together with City University and ChangeSchool are realizing Creative Spark: Higher Education Enterprise Programme. The train the trainers on subject “Entrepreneurship skills and Pedagogies” took place from January 28 till February 1 at ANEL within framework of Creative Spark programme. The trainers were Sara Jones (City University) and Neil Marshall (ChangeSchool). The training was for teachers of the Universities and aimed to transfer British Council experience on the field of Entrepreneurship and its Pedagogies.

Within scope of Creative Spark programme more than 500 students will get Entrepreneurship skills which will assist to the development of entrepreneurship ecosystem in Armenia.

About programme

Creative Spark is a five year initiative to support international university and institutional partnerships to develop enterprise skills and creative economy across seven countries in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan), South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) and Ukraine through UK support. 

In order to support higher education reform and respond to unemployment rates in these seven countries, we will use the UK’s experience to help develop enterprise education. This way we will support over 10,000 students and young entrepreneurs in the first year of the programme.  

The programme has three key elements:

1. Development of partnerships between universities and creative institutions in the UK and those in programme countries in order to support enterprise education and establish enterprise centres.
2. Delivering enterprise skills training packages to students and creative entrepreneurs, ranging from pitching ideas and starting a business, to protecting intellectual property and securing credit lines.
3. Delivering an English learning programme with a range of digital learning content including learning platforms, online courses and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) focused on English for entrepreneurship.

The expected outcomes are:

• to improve participants' awareness, entrepreneurship and English skills so that they are able to innovate and grow their business to support the development of creative economies
• to improve collaborative working between partners in the UK and programme countries for developing sustainable enterprise skills education systems and enterprise hubs.