Evaluability of a Vocational Teacher Training Programme Established through Bilateral Cooperation: An Analysis of Two Editions of an Indonesia-France Programme

Training programmes that originate in bilateral agreements fix their content before their participants are known, so their design does not start from a participant needs analysis. Evaluability assessment asks whether such a programme can be evaluated against its own objectives. This study examines the evaluability of a French cooking training programme for vocational teachers run by BBPPMPV Bisnis dan Pariwisata (the Center for the Development of Vocational Education Quality Assurance for Business and Tourism) with the Institut français d'Indonésie (IFI) and the Institut Disciples Escoffier (IDE) in its 2024 and 2025 editions. Using a descriptive evaluative approach and directed qualitative content analysis, the study analyses the Technical Arrangement, training guides, activity reports, programme structures, final examination score sheets, and certificates from both editions. Vocational curriculum, certification scheme, and competency test documents serve as comparators, and perception data from 40 teachers in the 2025 cohort serve as supplementary evidence. Four findings emerge. First, the programme content is relevant to the learning outcomes and competency tests of the vocational culinary curriculum, but the programme did not derive its training needs from these documents. Second, the project arrangement required under Article 4(3) of the Technical Arrangement has not been prepared for either edition. Third, the programme shrank from 370 to 158 instructional hours under a national spending efficiency policy, and the entire reduction fell on components other than hands-on production. The 60-hour culinary teaching component disappeared in the edition where 42 of 44 participants were teachers, while production hours rose from 120 to 135. Fourth, the 2025 assessment does not reach the training competences set out as the second and third objectives. The study recommends preparing the project arrangement for each edition and conducting evaluability assessment as a preliminary step before outcome evaluation.