We support Burma’s education sector through working in partnership with the Ministry of Education and enabling access to the UK's experience and expertise in priority areas of education reform. 

We organise international policy dialogues in Burma, bringing together key stakeholders and creating a platform to engage with British education institutions and organisations, national bodies, consultants and other international experts. 

We arrange study tours to the UK for high-level decision makers to familiarise themselves with how the UK sector operates and to raise awareness in the UK of Burma's education sector.

Through our education activities, we aim to build long term, trusting relationships and partnerships between the UK and Burma. 

We extend our support by enabling education policy makers to attend regional education policy dialogues and international conferences. We help ensure Burmese participation in key global events such as the Education World Forum and the British Council's annual conference Going Global.

Transforming Higher Education Leadership and Management Project (THEMP)

Transforming Higher Education in Leadership and Management Programme (THEMP), co-funded by the British Council and Irrawaddy Policy Exchange (IPE), provides capacity building for senior management teams in universities and national Education bodies to increase internationalisation and to improve the governance and management capacity of Higher Education of individuals and institutions. The project structure was co-designed by British Council, the Ministry of Education and National Education Policy Commission; academic staff form UCL Institute of Education designed and delivered the training content after consultation with local stakeholders, face-to-face and by webinar. The programme is co-designed and contextualised to be relevant to and meet the real needs of the Myanmar Higher Education sector.

Objectives

The programme aims to support the transformational shift focused on Higher Education set out in the roadmap of Myanmar’s Education reform, the National Education Strategic Plan (2016-2021), which is to enhance and strengthen the capacity and professional development of HE governance and management, and to support in establishing a “National Institute of Higher Education Development (NIHED)”. The programme also aims to create a better enabling environment for internationalisation of HE between UK and Myanmar. 

Activities in Myanmar

The pilot year of this project was run from November 2017 to October 2018.  It is anticipated that the programme will continue for two more years. 

During the pilot year, 11 universities with diverse needs and capacity across country took part in the programme, receiving training on strategic leadership and governance, leading and managing research, leading and managing teaching quality, leading and managing curriculum design and leading and managing assessment, feedback and evaluation. The training workshops were co-delivered by UCL and local trainers, following intensive training of the trainers run by UCL.

Moreover, the project delivered additional webinars on leadership and governance in order to enhance the capacity development of the HE institutions. The 11 participating universities developed individual institutional projects within their universities, designed to identify and address the needs of universities and to prepare them to become autonomous universities.

In addition, two national level conferences reaching out to over 100 universities were conducted in the first year.

The design and implementation of the next two-year programme will be based on the outcome and result of the first pilot year programme supporting in the transformation shift of Education sector in Myanmar. The programme will again be co-designed and co-developed with the Ministry of Education, Rector’s Committee and National Education Policy Commission.

We have produced a number of reports in 2013 in advocating and strengthening the education reforms in Myanmar. They are:

  1. Policy insights for HE - recommendations for Myanmar which explored the challenges of Higher education reform and supported by the University of London
  2. Empowering higher education in Myanmar universities in partnership with ADB, AusAID and UNCESCO.  
  3. Turning policy into action - UK-Myanmar partnership considering the practical measures and solutions that support the local reform in the sector.