Useful links
I oversee the delivery of the programme and make sure it’s fit for purpose. Making sure the learners get an experience whether it’s on a traineeship programme or an apprenticeship programme. Making sure we have relevant resources whether that’s online materials or practical materials.
50 years in operation. 3000 apps come through (see nlggta.co.uk). Currently we have around 80-90 apprentices on our programme. We also have another 25 traineeship learners on programme.
Where we are located has a high percentage of people from the EDI spectrum. In our lesson content we have modules around equity, diversity and inclusion.
We use the WorldSkills UK Learning Lab content for our traineeship learners. The Learning Lab content is vital because it gives learners a good idea of the types of resources they are going to work with and these are the resources they will use to increase their knowledge and put that knowledge into skills. I’ll be looking at how to bespoke the content to make it ideal for our learners. We can only give them 10% of what they need to know, the rest of it has to come from them.
We use a separate platform for our apprentices which is a virtual academy. We’ve included content that can be downloaded into pdf books to help encourage independent study and learning.
We’re operating as normal and have been for the last 18 months. Our trainee ship learners will come in for three days and we’ll split their time between practical in the morning and theory in the afternoon and then switch it around the next day. The third day is for them to update their CVs and portfolios. They’ll work with our recruitment teams to get themselves out there and get interviews set up and work placements and so on.
We were part of the focus group looking at updated content and the website. The content is very useful, like the basic health and safety guidance and if you wanted to look at other skills too. I work with the tutors running the programmes to make sure it’s all embedded and bespoked to the modules we want to deliver.
From the start we’ve had quite a positive response. Early resistance was overcome as soon as the trainees found how easy it was to use. The content is relevant and not too wordy, it’s quite straightforward for people to understand,
If you don’t try it, you’ll never know. It’s worth a try, it’s very ‘tailorable’ to individual or establishment needs. Try it, and you’ll enjoy it and it will be good.
It would be good to have a sharing platform so if say a college has a piece of content they feel is particularly relevant it could be shared across a multitude of sites as a best practice example.