Newcastle City Council – Unison
Felicity Mendelson, Senior Learning and Development Officer, Newcastle City Council and UNISON Union Learning Representative has been involved in unionlearn and Union Learning Fund projects since 2001, when she oversaw the setting up of a learning centre for City Council Staff. Since then, the Council have gone from strength to strength in engaging staff in learning, improving their literacy, numeracy and ICT skills and in achieving NVQs.
Despite this, Felicity is really excited by the Bridges to Learning project, which has provided an opportunity not only to address the skill needs of a new group of Council staff but also to trial to new progression routes in learning.
Felicity said “I’m passionate about providing opportunities to people and our ULF and Unison projects have already helped hundreds of people. However, this is the first project that takes us beyond Skills for Life and NVQs to give people their first step to do university education and it provides an excellent model for other parts of the Council.”
The focus of this project is to help almost 500 staff who are engaged in the delivery of “Adult Services”, back into learning. Around 140 of these staff work in the City’s 4 Resource Centres, which provide emergency short-stay care, respite and day care and community rehabilitation, with the remainder of staff being involved in the delivery of care at home. This includes hands on support for older people, assisting them to dress for example, and re-enabling them, where ever possible, to take care of themselves after discharge from hospital or a long term illness.
Through a combination of road shows, one-to-one discussions with over 380 members of staff and other marketing activities, the team was successful in identifying a wide range learning interests amongst staff as well as real enthusiasm amongst some to aim even higher.
Such was the enthusiasm for the Open University’s K101 Introduction to Health & Social Care course and the Integrated Vocational Route, which offers the K101 alongside an NVQ Level 3, that the team had to put in place an application and selection process. This took the form of asking each applicant to provide a short statement explaining why they wanted to do the course and the difference it would make to their lives.
Wendy Aitman, a UNISON ULR whose secondment to the project for 20 hours per week has been secured through the Bridges to Learning partnership from the City Council, reported;
“We wanted to make sure we had support in place for everyone, whether it was study skills or language support for those whose first language is not English (ESOL). We chose this process so we could really look at their motivation rather than their writing ability as we wanted to support everyone who wanted to do this and make sure nobody fails”.
As a result of their careful and caring approach, 13 people from a wide mix of ages, work areas and different ethnic backgrounds enrolled for the OU course in September and they’re not only still engaged on the course but they are recommending it to others, so much so, that from the number of enquiries recently, the team already have another group ready to start.
The demand for the additional OU programme has also been stimulated by the success of the other learning opportunities that the team has put in place, including ICT, Literacy and ESOL classes, which are run at Westgate College in the West End of Newcastle, and in the Council’s Learning Zone in their Byker Depot.
Chris Dugdale, Manager of the City Council’s Care Service is delighted with the success of Bridges to Learning:
“The ULRs have really gone out of their way in adopting a supportive outreach approach. They went to great lengths to meet night staff, often a forgotten group and I’m very keen to see them develop. They also made sure that they fitted in with people’s timetables; for example, arranging to meet one member who was coming off duty at their local Asda as she shopped before she went home. This really has put care staff at ease and made them feel valued, so it’s no wonder we’ve had such a successful project.”
