Skills for life outreach project develops

In the past couple of months Ufi/learndirect has put together an Outreach Project Team to work with local community groups in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In this article Linda Mears, manager of the project for Ufi/learndirect looks at the work that has taken place so far.

The outreach project is designed to increase the number of learners undertaking skills for life courses. The outreach workers are developing contacts with, and talking to, many locally-based voluntary and community organisations that are interested in helping their clients develop their skills. The outreach team aims to develop partnerships with these organisations so that they signpost their clients to learndirect skills for life courses. This collaboration eases the route to learning for people with skills for life needs and enables the organisations to offer a new service to their client base.

Our team of product demonstrators works closely with staff from Ufi regional offices to engage the interest of suitable organisations at a local level. The value of their groundwork is now evident from the burgeoning number of organisations that wish to work with us. The diversity of these is huge and includes groups focusing on parents, youth, women, ex-offenders and the homeless.

But this is not the only work in which the team is involved. At a national level, we are contracting with community organisations through the umbrella group Community Matters and are in discussions with the Princeís Trust and Stonham Housing on how to engage their staff and clients in learning.

And we have just heard that The Salvation Army wish to start working with us by kicking off the project in 50 of their centres across the country. All this success means that we are currently expanding the project team so that there will be one product demonstrator dedicated to each region. We know there are lots of people out there with skills for life issues and this project is beginning to show some results. I would urge people to contact their product demonstrator to find out what help learndirect can offer.

If you would like to contribute ideas or find out more, please contact the outreach project manager Linda Mears on (lmears@ufi.com).