1st consultation events

Last week we had our first two consultation events in Manchester and London aimed specifically at practitioners, although we did have a pretty wide range of attendees.  I have to say I found both events very informative and constructive, if not at times a little challenging, but nobody ever said this was going to be easy….or if they did I clearly wasn’t paying attention! 

It is quite hard to try and summarise all the debate and I didn’t want to publish all the notes at this stage, as I think it is important that each event starts with a clean sheet of paper.  So I am going to just mention some key questions or points I took away with me.

A fundamental area is around the whole question of Continuous Professional Development (CPD).  But crucially this is not just about the ‘supply side’ of ensuring good CPD, which is of course vital,  but practitioners felt very strongly that key to success will be support and encouragement from providers to enable their workforce to engage with CPD.  Easy to say and of course there will always be resource considerations, but if the Guild doesn’t have some meaningful and positive impact on CPD in the round, then I have a horrible feeling it will rapidly lose credibility with the workforce. Equally a couple of good ideas of how good CPD might be delivered were suggested – perhaps based on the Open University type model and definitely using modern technology where appropriate.

Some interesting challenges that the Guild needs to be for anyone delivering training in the learning and skills sector and not just those funded by Government.  Personally, whilst this might be a longer term aspiration and may involve different approaches, I am not clear if it would work in real life – although pretty sure I didn’t convince some of the attendees, so will need to think more about this.

Again as you might expect there was a strong message that if we want to achieve workforce buy-in to the whole concept then we best jolly well ensure that there are processes for practitioners to be involved in deciding what the Guild actually does - need to avoid a purely top down approach and also ensure practitioners have a real voice which is heard.  Whilst we do say this in the consultation document, perhaps it’s not strong enough and we need to elaborate a bit more on thinking here.

Also some debates about costs etc; how Guild will be different from IfL/LSIS; should it be an individual membership body; how will learners be represented; is there overlap with other bodies etc? I didn’t take a poll, but there was also some who argued for mandated qualifications for staff, and it will be interesting to see if this theme comes through other consultation events.

So overall I am very grateful for all those who took time to come to these first events and they certainly helped to get the process off to a flying start….. 10 more events over the next 7 days with really good attendance, which also means lots of train journeys for more blog drafting!