Construction and the Built Environment

John Stopani Director of 14-19 Partnerships, Croydon Borough Wide Consortium
Michael White, Practitioner, Leeds College of Building
Sally Spaworth, Leeds Chamber of Commerce
Jon Hinson, Operations Manager and Employer Ambassador, Carrillion, Leeds
Andy Williams, Consortium Lead, Rural Norfolk Extended Consortium

Narrator: In order to achieve the strong commitment to employer engagement required for the Diploma, each consortium needs to develop its own individual strategy.

Construction worker: The steel leg standing up, that's basically your temporary deck.

Narrator: The Croydon consortium began collaborating with employers in 2006.

John Stopani Director of 14-19 Partnerships, Croydon Borough Wide Consortium: In 2005 we knew very well that the agenda, the government's agenda, was employers taking the lead in terms of developing new qualifications. We were aware of that. We then set up and did the cold calling and introduced ourselves and were very proactive in getting the ball rolling. And from that came our relationship with Wate's Construction who have been highly supportive from 2005 to now, as a major partner in our operation.

Narrator: Whereas the Croydon consortium found its employer contacts independently, in Leeds, the Chamber of Commerce set up a support network for employer engagement.

Michael White, Practitioner, Leeds College of Building: A lot of the work has been done by Leeds Chamber of Commerce. We basically have contacted and they've been involved with getting the information together, to actually sort of push this information out towards employers. The government has actually put a lot of money into developing this system.

Sally Spaworth, Leeds Chamber of Commerce: My job involves raising awareness about the Diplomas to employers. Then going out and signing them up to support the Diploma in a variety of ways. So it's giving them the option to say whether they can provide work placements, school visits, taster days, careers guidance, training for teachers. So they've got a variety of ways that they can get involved, it's not just about work placements.

Narrator: Through this system, the Leeds consortium has forged links with the large construction company, Carrillion.

Michael White: Having Carrillion onboard, it's made our life a lot easier, there's a lot more employers who think well if Carrillion are onboard with it then you know maybe it's something we should be doing, you know - I mean there's a lot of kudos involved, it's one of the biggest companies in the country. The guy who actually is involved is so focussed and so enthusiastic.

Jon Hinson, Operations Manager and Employer Ambassador, Carrillion, Leeds: Right, okay I would love to meet you. We are using our name and reputation to help get other employers onboard. But in fairness there are some other very good businesses in and around the Leeds area that have come to the table through their own volition to say, can we help?

Narrator: Work related learning is key to the success of the Diploma, but not all consortia will have large employers on board. The Extended Rural Norfolk Federation Consortium is a case in point.

Andy Williams, Consortium Lead, Extended Rural Norfolk Federation Consortium: We're a very rural consortium, if you were to draw a line on the map joining together all the high schools in our consortium there's not a lot in between those particular small centres of population.

Narrator: In this case those involved needed to develop a different strategy.

Andy Williams: We had to engage with the existing links we've got, many of them small or medium sized industries, and engage those employers in a new way that would help support our Diploma delivery.
Our vision was very much that we wanted to deliver locally. The nature of this rural area in Norfolk is that students would regularly spend an hour on coaches just getting to their high schools. So we needed to work within our local community otherwise we'd be adding even longer times to those journeys.

Narrator: To help solve this problem, the consortium has set up a work space on an industrial estate, surrounded by small and medium-sized businesses.

Andy Williams: The beauty of being on the industrial estate is of course that we can walk out of the door and within a half mile radius we've engineering firms, we've supply firms for the construction trade, we've got planners, we're next door to a windows and conservatory manufacturer and they can pop round the corner to us and we can pop round the corner to them and build those relationships up. That's got to be more successful than us moving into a more urban area and trying to engage with lots of other schools and lots of other consortiums for the same number of businesses in that area.

Narrator: This consortium has found that the employer engagement strategy needs to be different when dealing with small and medium-sized businesses.

Andy Williams: The small and medium-sized businesses don't have the capacity to commit to longer periods of time. Whilst it might be wonderful for us to have them every Monday afternoon for a month, clearly on a smaller business that isn't going to be viable. Therefore we have to work flexibly with them about how they engage with us.
The other thing we can do is that we've been able to put into place a number of high tech solutions. So we can do things like video links with employers and so on. So we've worked quite hard at it and we've got a long way to go, but I think that approach has been really, really helpful to us, perhaps more so than working with one of the bigger construction companies.

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