Jan Edwards
Dr Jan Edwards has over 40 years-experience in education working across adult and vocational education and training, school counselling, educational research, distance education and special education. For the past 20 years she has worked as an international Gender Equality, Social Inclusion and Civil Society Engagement Specialist (GESI and CSE) in Indonesia, Cambodia, Nepal, Fiji, PNG, Solomon Islands, Laos, Vanuatu, Samoa, Kiribati, Timor Leste, Trinidad and Tobago, Viet Nam, Philippines. She has worked with various development partners (Australian Aid, ILO, USAID, World Bank, EUD and ADB, PLAN International and Vision 2020). Jan works on issues of inclusion and her work addresses intersections of disadvantage (poverty, gender, disability, rurality, ethnicity, family violence and child protection). Jan has recently completed 2 major studies on TVET, the first in Vietnam for the ADB and a second for the World Bank in Indonesia.
Before starting work in international development Jan worked in the South Australian education sector in curriculum development, education research, school counselling, primary, special and distance education. She has worked on Projects of National Significance, Transient Students and the Students Completing Schooling Project. She is author and co-author of a number of published articles and research products including Listen to me, I’m leaving: Early school leaving in South Australian secondary schools in the late 1990s. Jan holds a PhD in Sociology of Education, Masters of Social Science: Counselling and Masters of Program Evaluation, Bachelor of Special Education, Diploma of Teaching and a Graduate Diploma in Educational Counselling.