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!
