Ray Isaacs, IT Diploma Consortium Lead, South Holland
Nigel Akers, IT Diploma Co-ordinator, Nottingham City
Kathy Matthews, Business Engagement Adviser, NEBA
Ray Isaacs, IT Diploma Consortium Lead, South Holland: I targeted employers for whoever I could get! I did. And because of the geography of this area, from one side of the consortium to the other you’re talking of 50 miles, so it’s very hard to ship people around. It’s very hard to use employers in the largest town in our consortia. Initially I rang lots of employers up, sent them out letters and invited them into school. We were going to give them a buffet lunch, complete with wine even, but we had so few responses. So it ended up that last summer, when the Year 11s had left and Year 10s were on work experience, I was actually going out approaching employers and telling them what the Diploma was about and trying to bring them on board that way.
It has been down to simply going out, meeting people and being brave enough to talk to them, and that was not an easy task to start with. As teachers we tend to be in our classroom, we’re quite happy talking to youngsters, but to go out into the world of industry and talk to those for the first half dozen times was… I didn’t feel very comfortable. I was well outside my comfort zone. I’ve had to get a champion in many companies, someone who will go with me initially so that they can push it through to start with. Managing Directors are not always willing to come and see someone who just turns up on the door, they need an appointment, so you’ve got to get a way in.
The ones I approached, once I’d gone through what the Diploma was about and that it was the soft skills that employers had been asking for, most of them came on board quite happily.
Nigel Akers, IT Diploma Co-ordinator, Nottingham City: We’ve been very fortunate here in Nottingham that we’ve been working very closely with our local business champion, John Blankley from Toshiba, who has been doing some of the running around, contacts that he’s got through the IT world have been very useful. He has then done a bit of that cold calling, handed them on to the EBP to take to the next stage on.
Kathy Matthews, Business Engagement Adviser, NEBA: I’m a business engagement adviser. There were four of us taken on two years ago by Nottinghamshire Education Business Alliance, particularly to work with employer engagement for the Diplomas and we’re part of the planning process for the Diploma and ensuring that employers are part of the process right from the planning stage. So we represent employers and we also bring employers to the table.
Nigel Akers: The companies that the EBP managed to get through this project were the likes of Capital One - who’d never done work placements before for any 14 year olds, and said "Yes, we will give one place" - John Lewis, Coca Cola, Siemens. So, quite a range of local companies, but quality work placements, and that was invaluable in terms of giving some quality to the IT Diploma work experience side of things.
Kathy Matthews: I think EBPs have a huge part to play, and an even bigger part in the future, because lots of companies are getting fed up with individual schools asking them for the requests. We need to act as brokers. If I can just give you an example, the NHS locally want to use us as a broker. So they’re going to say to schools, "Don’t contact us directly, come through NEBA," and I’ll be a contact point and then I will feed requests on. We’re going to have online application forms for work experience. It needs to become more strategic and it needs to be managed better because otherwise employers haven’t got time to deal with all these requests, so they just say no.
Ray Isaacs: As the Diploma grows I think the consortia will have to have a centralised system. Even though we’re a rural area it will be the larger towns that will be hit more, so we’ve got to have a centralised system to ensure that we’re not just attacking the same employers, because there’ll be so many Diplomas online in South Holland next year, that getting employers could be difficult unless we can get the Diplomas to use the same employers, because there are many employers that are able to fulfil the needs of more than one Diploma. And if we are doing the IT Diploma there are many who are in Society Health and Development who are using IT that we can tap into as well.
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