SETIP is a five-year project jointly run by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, the Shanghai Teacher Training Centre and our Shanghai office. It started from 2001 and will finish in 2006.

The long-term project objective is to improve the quality of English language teaching in all Shanghai's primary and secondary schools, and thus produce school leavers with a communicative competence in English. To achieve this, it is planned to set up a unified in-service teacher development programme for Shanghai's 13,000 English teachers.

In the first year of the project, forty teacher trainers spent twelve weeks in the UK at the College of St Mark & St John, Warwick University and Bell International, receiving training in ELT Methodology and Teacher Training. From November 2002, a group of the more experienced trainers have started to design and deliver formal in-service teacher development courses for groups of teachers and subject supervisors. These experimental courses were reviewed in January by representatives from the three UK ELT training providers and training courses at three levels (primary, junior middle and senior middle) are now being piloted.  As further groups of trainers are trained in the UK, the local in-service training courses will be cascaded throughout the city's nineteen educational districts.