One of many 2013 YALS events aimed at continuing professional development

During 2012/2013 school year, YALS was highly active. Enlisted below are the activities we were involved in as well as our plans for the forthcoming period:

• we signed the contract with the British Council, Belgrade, October 2012 . We provided the text and information about our association for the BC website (as agreed in the contract). We put the BC banners on our website;

• we had a representative  at the EAQUALS workshop meeting in Berlin, November 2012;

• we organized 9th YALS in-house seminar  at Oxford School, Leskovac, in November, 2012;

• we continue to promote our Association and as a result, Oxford School from Krusevac  and Britannica from Nis have joined us. Both schools successfully passed  inspections and became YALS associate members at the December 2012 meeting;

• we had several representatives at the Conference organized by the Faculty of Philology, in December, 2012;

• we maintained the contact with Mirjana Bjelobaba from the Chamber of Commerce and had two meetings with her in November 2012 and March 2013;

•  YALS members, who are also members of  the Department for Language schools within the Chamber of Commerce,  participated at the meeting in December 2012;

• we participated in the National conference on professional development organized by the British Council in March, 2013;

• together with the BC we organized a fabulous seminar with Jamie Keddie, Withholding the Image in March, 2013; the seminar was accredited by the Ministry of Education;

• we had two representatives at the EAQUALS Conference in Dublin, April 2013 and Belgrade will be the host to the EAQUALS workshop in November, 2014;

• as a result of the Agreement between ELTA and YALS, we exchanged representatives  for YALS seminar in March and the ELTA conference in May, 2013;

• we organized the traditional YALS literary competition in May 2013 and thanks to our cooperation with Pearson the winners were given readers;

• school Swanbell from Belgrade successfully passed YALS full inspection and became YALS full member at our meeting in June 2013;

• we finished the regular inspections on academic management within YALS schools;

• in order to start the process of certification of YALS schools, we also organized a new cycle of teaching inspections in all YALS schools. We are really pleased that all the schools successfully passed both inspections;

• the group for inspection within YALS updated and improved  the Inspection scheme;

• we redesigned YALS websit;

• the group for new members admission clarified the process of joining YALS and created a new, easily understandable scheme with all the details included; extra support will be provided for prospective members;

• as a result of our constant efforts to promote the quality in language schools, YALS has been invited to participate in the Regional Conference on Evaluation to be held in Zagreb in June 2013. The organizer of the event is the Regional Association for Adult Learnin;

• we have been implementing the British Council project ” English for IT “ in four municipalities in Serbia – Vrbas, Sabac, Obrenovac and Blace;

• all our students and teachers actively use the British Council website for teaching and learning English;

• the next YALS in-house seminar will be in Penguin English school in Jagodina in December 2013;

• we have decided to prepare a workshop on management in private language schools for the next ELTA conference in May 2014;

• we will continue to organize seminars with the British Council and as possible speakers we would like to invite Sue Leather and Adrian Tennant.

For us this was a successful year, yet we know we should do more on attracting new members and thus, enhancing our association.