Society, Health and Development

Meriel Tootell, Diploma Line Lead, Bolton Consortium
Lisa Hoseason, Diploma Line Lead, Newcastle Consortium
Caroline Knight, SHD Practitioner, Newcastle Consortium

Narrator: Recognising the potential for relationships with sector agencies, is vital when setting out to meet an employer.
The Bolton consortium started by casting its net wide and succeeded in finding a valuable contact in Skills for Health.

Meriel Tootell, Diploma Line Lead, Bolton Consortium: Initially we just sent letters out to lots of local employers, leaflets about it, and asked if they would like to be involved in any way and trying to gauge what they knew about it.
I think the best thing we probably did was we organised an employer lunch and we targeted specific employers from the four sectors in the area. And they came for lunch, we talked about the Diploma and we did some workshops and we actually got them to sign up to being involved. And we, sort of, used that for those people to champion the Diploma. And I think our biggest breakthrough was the contact I've had with Skills for Health.

The person I was in contact with knew how trusts worked, so she was able to get to the right person that we needed, really, to start the ball rolling for the projects.

Narrator: The Newcastle consortium capitalised on opportunities presented by training and local events, and found the community justice sector was not as impenetrable as it had first thought.

Lisa Hoseason, Diploma Line Lead, Newcastle Consortium: Well, we were quite lucky and within our three day practitioner training, our second day was dedicated to the justice sector. And in the morning we went to our local Crown Court and we met with a guy there who organises trips for students and, you know, talks for practitioners as well.

And in the afternoon we met up with a lady from the local Criminal Justice Board and she gave us lots of contacts as well.

We thought it was quite inaccessible because it's, you know, you think about that it's private and it's confidential, but it wasn't really. And once we actually got started and realised of all the contacts - you know, the contacts that we had and the possibilities that were out there it was actually quite easy to get in contact and people were quite keen.

Narrator: Practitioner, Caroline Knight, made use of personal contacts.

Caroline Knight, SHD Practitioner, Newcastle Consortium: I have a friend who works for professional standards in Northumbria Police and I was just chatting to her informally about, you know, "I'm teaching this unit on the Diploma about safeguarding and protecting people, we're doing community justice and I think, you know, the police would be the ideal professionals to come in and talk to the students about how they keep people safe. Who is the best person I need to speak to?" And she said, "Oh, your neighbourhood team will want to be involved in that."

So I just looked on the Northumbria Police website, found a contact for the neighbourhood team and sent an email, and it went from there.

Narrator: The consortium also made valuable contacts via the Newcastle Educational Business Partnership organisation, whose role it is to form links between schools and employers.

Lisa Hoseason: NEBP have been really helpful, and with the contacts that they have they've helped to put us in contact with the Newcastle youth offending team and the Sunderland youth offending team as well. And the students are actually going out to see them next month and they're going to spend an afternoon at the youth courts, and they're going to meet a probation officer and a social worker within that team.

But we like to just sit down and establish how we can work together to get the best for them and for the students. Because at the end of the day we're trying to provide them with future employees, we're trying to provide them with people in the end who they want to employ. So it's getting through to them that it's, you know, within their best interests to take on these students as well and to train them up to be the employees that they want them to be.

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