Construction and the Built Environment

John Stopani, Director of 14-19 Partnerships, Croydon Borough Wide Consortium
Andy Williams, Consortium Lead, Extended Rural Norfolk Federation Consortium
Peter Weavers, Architect

Narrator: Many schools and colleges have experience of working with employers for other construction qualifications. But getting employers to engage with the 50% of applied learning needed for the Diploma in Construction and the Built Environment, requires a rigorous approach.

John Stopani, Director of 14-19 Partnerships, Croydon Borough Wide Consortium: The biggest barrier was really employers' prior experience of trying to relate to education, you know experience - you heard quite disastrous things where employers had gone to educational establishments and the class has been cancelled and they hadn't been notified. Or they'd arranged a visit to a site and a group of students who saw it as a jolly and an afternoon off came and disrupted the whole activity. We had to make quite sure that those negative experiences were allayed, and start afresh.

Narrator: To achieve this, the consortium negotiated a set of rules with employers governing the contribution each side would make in delivering the Diploma. It forms the basis for any relationship with a new employer.

John Stopani: When we approach an employer, we are stressing the fact that we do business on certain terms and they would never have those experiences if they engage with us. And that removed the barriers. And of course once one employer has had that experience and can tell another that's how we do business they will do business with us.

Narrator: But employer engagement is harder for rural consortia, with large distances between employers and schools. Rural areas also tend to have more small and medium-sized enterprises with fewer resources for engaging with learners.

Andy Williams, Consortium Lead, Extended Rural Norfolk Federation Consortium: 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 in a smaller business that isn't going to be viable. We would look to use them at certain periods of time, we would try and make our curriculum fit to them where it was really important that we did get an employer engagement in at a particular time. So it is all about being flexible.

Narrator: So the Extended Rural Norfolk Federation Consortium has set up a base on an industrial estate to engage with employers, ranging from plumbers and electricians to architects and project managers.

Andy Williams: The beauty of being on the industrial estate is that all the people around us, all our neighbours actually can contribute to what we're doing here. A lot of them are small businesses, only employing a few dozen people at the most. We've used local suppliers where we can. So they have actually got an interest in us through the money that we're investing in them. It also cuts down on travel time; it cuts down on travel time for them. It helps us overcome some of the issues that we've been discussing earlier.

Narrator: Many practitioners think getting employers like architects engaged in the Diploma is difficult. But even in rural areas like Norfolk, employers were keen to get involved.

Peter Weavers, Architect: The professional areas that we cover are architectural design, building maintenance, valuation, estate management, project management. What we want to do is demonstrate to young people what the range of options are for them. And to actually show them by what means they can actually enter the industry.

Narrator: Health and safety is also a major concern in the Diploma, particularly for visits. Large companies will often have specialised health and safety teams to give advice, but consortia also have to play their part.

Andy Williams: We've looked to put together some reasonably generic heath and safety resources, which with a little bit of tweaking you can apply to a particular situation. So we're slowly building up a database of sorts that says well if you're visiting this particular site this sort of thing is okay to do with students, however this probably we didn't ought to be doing.
In that way we've tried to keep the employers as advisors to us on that rather than there being a real emphasis on the employer to be sure that every 'i' was dotted and 't' was crossed when a visit was taking place.

Narrator: Insurance for young people on construction sites can be problematic, particularly for learners under 16, but in these cases, other solutions are available.

Architect: We've actually started the construction now, all these - all the big bits of steel there - that's all the structural steel holding the main buildings up.

Andy Williams: We can do things with video cameras that go out. We can do things like video links with employers and so on. So it doesn't always involve an actual visit to the workplace. Although clearly from the students' point of view that is something that's really attractive and they'd much rather be doing that than sitting doing a video link to an employer, it's much more real to them.

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