Schools helping parents back to work...
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Paddy 25 November 2009, 11:45am |
Welcome from the Learning Exchange to anyone who is involved in the School Gates initiative. If you have recently become a member of the Learning Exchange, you are welcome to start sharing your questions, ideas, and good practice here.
Go to the JOIN US page on the Learning Exchange website to join up - it's free to join - and then you can start posting to this forum |
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Jane Ager
19 February 2010, 10:04am |
Hi, I'm Jane and I am due to start working as a JCP adviser on the School Gates initiative in Birmingham. I'm keen to make contact with any other JCP advisers who are working on this initiative in other parts of the country to share good practice etc. I'm aware from the School Gates website that this initiative is already up and running in London and Manchester. |
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kerrycox
05 March 2010, 10:48am |
Hi Jane I am working on the School Gates Initiative in Middlesbrough. How are you finding things in Birmingham? We have our launch events coming up over the next few weeks. |
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Jane Ager
09 March 2010, 11:43am |
Hi Kerry, good to hear from you. Our first parent event is on 17/3/10. We have two advisers from JCP working in the Birmingham and Solihull District. Will be interested to see how School gates is set up in Middlesbrough. |
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Paddy 09 March 2010, 12:45pm |
Hi Jane and Kerry - please don't forget to keep sharing your School Gate work on this forum - particularly the tricky issues that arise. Remember that if you have any questions about what you are doing, post them here and I can pass them on to Dawn Gilderoy at ContinYou or one of her other School Gate colleagues. They would answer you here so that everyone gets to see the information. I hope everything's going well! |
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Paddy 18 March 2010, 4:47pm |
If you need School Gates or the Job Centre Plus logos in various formats, you'll find information at www.schoolgates.org.uk about how to access them. If you have any difficulty with these, please email publications@continyou.org.uk. |
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diane ford
29 March 2010, 9:33am |
Hi, i'm Diane from JCP. I will be working with Jane on the Birmingham school gates initiative. we did our first parent session on 17th April to 10 parents -very positive response received from both parents & school. we are doing a follow on session this week with 8 parents that wished to see us again. we have learnt valuable lessons from this one session & have decided to slightly change certain aspects of the session accordingly. we would be interested in hearing how the sessions are going in other areas. |
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Gary Bell 04 May 2010, 9:43am |
Hi I'm Gary, the JCP School Gates Adviser working in Knowsley, Merseyside. We are working with 5 schools in the area providing in-depth IAG support and working with other Partner Organisations in the area to provide further specialist support to our customers. So far we have found that we are getting more out of "piggy-backing" on activities already running in the schools, such as coffee mornings, Parent Groups etc. We have found that the parents are less suspicious of our motives for talking to them if we are introduced by the schools. The schools we are working with have been very supportive and are doing all they can to promote the service, which is making the parents more willing to speak to an adviser. We will also be holding a Launch Event in late May/early June to further promote the service & other services in the area, and will follow this up with mini-launch events at each school involved. I don't know if any of you attended the Emerging Practives event in London on 28th April, but we in Knowsley found it very informative, and it was really useful to see how things are going in other areas. We were particularly impressed with Middlesborough, in the way they explained how they set up their Launch Event, and Nottingham, who we felt had excellent publicity to engage with families. Regards Gary |
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Kerry Cox
04 May 2010, 3:07pm |
Hi all I am currently working in Middlesbrough with my colleague Trish Connor who I believe some of you may have met in London last week. Thank you Gary for your favourable feedback - it means a lot to us because it was extremely hardwork getting everything off the ground! We are now able to get on with the everyday job and are now planning the next steps of our engagement and activity with the parents. We have done very similar to yourself in some respects Gary as we have tapped into current activities via the PSAs and now have our own network of parents who regularly come to see us. Kerry |
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Paddy 05 May 2010, 11:19am |
Welcome to the Learning Exchange, Gary and Kerry. This looks as if it could be a good forum - please keep posting your thoughts and tips. I'm so impressed with everyone's progress - good luck with moving forward and keep in touch. All the best Paddy |
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Paddy 05 May 2010, 11:20am |
I meant to say too - it was great to meet you both, Jane & Diane from Birmingham! Good luck up there - you're doing a tough job! |
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Jamir
25 May 2010, 4:07pm |
Hello All My name is Jamir and I am new into the School Gates Initiative. I work in East London covering 8 different school. Please forward any good working practices and feel free to question me - i hope i can help as well. Regards |
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Paddy 25 May 2010, 4:37pm |
Hi Jamir - have a look at www.schoolgates.org.uk and explore the Resources section. There's an emerging practice page, where we are gradually collecting as much as we can of the examples of what people have been doing in other areas. But please do keep posting any questions here and I will help direct your questions to the right person. All the best with the work! Paddy |
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diane ford
30 July 2010, 4:55pm |
Hi everyone - after looking forward to the 6 week holiday to "wind down" i'm exhausted! we have been liaising with extended cluster co - ordinators to establish where they were holding events & holiday schemes that we could attend to market the pilot. unfortunately, everyone seems to be running things for the same 2 weeks so our feet haven't touched the ground this week & next week is looking the same. i went to a fantastic event @ Aston Villa football club & managed to engage with around 80 parents - some of whom remembered me from our first presentation in April - don't know if that's a good thing or not! The 14 schools we work most regularly with have all signed up for dates in the new academic year & we are looking to take on a further 10 - 15 schools before the end of the pilot in march. keep up the good work everone & look forward to reading your thoughts & tips |
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Helen
04 August 2010, 8:47am |
Hi All! I'm the School Gates Co-ordinator for the project in Merthyr Tydfil. The project has been rolled out slightly different in Wales, with the local authority hosting a team consisting of 2 co-ordinators (job share), two advisors and an administrator. The JCP advisor works as part of this team although obviously managed through JCP. This set up has worked well for us, and we have engaged with a large number of parents in the initial schools that we've worked within. At the begining of the project, at the end of May, Gates held a launch for providers and potential partners, and established how they could add value to the project as well as how we could support them. As their criteria is slightly different, their client group is non workers and those working less than 16 hours, we have altered our project to match theirs. This has been highly succesful, with Bridges Into Work carrying out the majority of the training that we have run over the summer - they supply the tutor, we supply the venue and participants. Gates began roll out in early June with the intention of working with five schools initially, and then working with an additional four in September. This didnt work out well, as we had too much take up from the first two schools we worked with, so as a result we are altering the delivery plan. I believe our success has been the flexible way we are delivering the project, responding to the needs of the parents and the community they live in. With the JCP advisor full embedded into the team, it has allowed the project to give accurate advice directly to parents without the need to refer them back to other JCP provision. We have started to see results with three parents back into employment and another three starting businesses. We are also getting a lot of parents wanting to return to education which we have actively support, placing them on basic skills courses as well as looking at further education provision. The project has had its issues. We weren't prepared for the level of parents with confidence and basic skills needs. We have also run a lot of courses over the summer, which has resulted in a nightmare for sorting out child care. We've had a learning curve as to what events to attend, school concerts have yielded very little, where as sports day has been very succesful. I also think that each school is different, and speaking to teachers, dinner staff and road crossing staff to find out the best method of engagement is key. Putting a cake as a thank you in the staff room has really worked, which is something that we picked up from one of the English projects. I hope the Merthyr Tydfil experience helps other projects, and look forward to hearing how other projects are getting on! Helen Kell |
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Gary Bell 18 October 2010, 4:48pm |
Hello All I'm sorry it's been a while since my last update, but things have been really busy at School Gates Knowsley and as I am the only adviser on our Initiative I don't always have the time to blog as much as I would like. I just thought I would give you all a quick update on what has been happening with School Gates in the Knowsley area. As I have previously explained we are working with 5 primary schools in the Kirkby area of Knowsley, in Merseyside, and it's associated Children's Centres. We have been very busy since my last post and feel that the initiative is doing really well in the area. Although we had been up and running properly since April 2010 In June we held our Launch Event. We were lucky enough to be able to have free use of a large unit in a busy shopping area of the town centre in Kirkby. We held a market stall event, bringing in many other employability partners to promote their services and gave away goodie bags and prizes etc to parents signing up. All in all over 200 people attended the event, and although only a percentage of these were eligible for School Gates we found that it really promoted the service and allowed us to engage with parents that we may not have had the opportunity to do so with. We recently followed this up with another similar event in September with the thinking that we could capture new parents accessing the schools and that after the Summer Holidays some parents would be more willing to undertake training or look for work. Again we had almost 200 people attend throughout the day, and because of the excellent partner links in Knowsley everybody who attended was eligible to work with at least one of the various organisations in attendance. In July we were visited by David Churchill from the Child Poverty Unit, who was given a whistle-stop tour of the facilities we use, such as the local council Jobs Bus, one of the schools involved, and a local Children's Centre used to see parents. David was able to talk to parents, partner organisations and head teachers to see how School Gates is helping in the area. Though I am not sure how much of my own faced-paced Scouse speak he was able to take in! We have found that Word Of Mouth has been our most invaluable selling tools in promoting the School Gates Initiative in the area, and indeed I have it on good authority that the parents using the service have nothing but praise for the service and are eagerly encouraging their friends to access the service. We also decided that we would embrace Social Networking as a good tool to promote events we are involved in and information about our service. We have found that a lot of our parents use Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter and MySpace and so have therefore set up pages on these sites. (See Links Below) In order to promote diverse events to promote School Gates and the other services available in the area I have helped set up the Knowsley Engagement Co-Operative which is made up of School Gates and various employability partner organisations such as Jobcentre Plus, Working Links, Shaw Trust, A4E and the local colleges and training organisations. We use this to promote inter-partnership working, organise events, share good practice and keep our local provider knowledge up to date. It has been an excellent way of getting word out to people who can make referrals to the initiative. Between us we recently arranged a Retail Roadshow - taking the Jobs Bus into the community to promote vacancies in the Retail Sector for Christmas and beyond. They event was a great success again attended by in excess of 200 people and brought more referrals into our initiative. We intend to follow this up with more events, which I will try to keep you informed about. I think I should probably leave things there for now, in case this turns into an essay. If you would like any more information about what we are doing in Knowsley feel free to send me a message. Regards Gary
PS If you want to check out our social networks sites they are:- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kirkby-United-Kingdom/School-Gates-Knowsley/123576437665332 http://www.myspace.com/schoolgatesknowsley |
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Katie
01 November 2010, 1:46pm |
Hello All, I am new to the School Gates Project in Middlesbrough, working as support to the advisers. At a recent meeting we discussed settting up a facebook page as a way to keep parents updated on School Gates events but data protection issues were raised. I've had a look at yours Gary and I'd really like to set something similar up for our area. Have you got any tips? How do you manage the data protection side of things? Thanks, Katie |
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Paddy 02 November 2010, 11:12am |
Katie, here is a link that might help with regard to privacy issues on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php |
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Gary Bell 02 November 2010, 11:24am |
We discussed privacy issues with regards to Facebook and decided that as would never included any client information on the site that Facebook was a viable way of promoting services. The only real issue has been with clients appearing on photographs, but we have a Media Consent form that we ask any person appearing in a photograph to sign if they have no objection to appearing on a photograph on the site. If a parent does not want to appear on any of our media then we won't include them. We mainly use the site to publicise upcoming events for both School Gates and partners. The page is also set up as School Gates Knowsley, rather than as any of the people involved in the project so that the privacy of individuals can be maintained. I really do recommend it as a way for parents to keep up to date with what is happening with your project - we have only had positive comments about our Facebook page so I think it would work the same for you. If I can be of any help to you please let me know. Regards Gary |
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Claire A 05 November 2010, 4:28pm |
Hello, School Gates people, I'm supporting Knowlsley, Manchester and Liverpool on School Gates, althought they are all such great local authorities, with brilliant members of staff that they have made my role a very pleasant experience. I was in Manchester recently and they told me about a staff day they held to ensure individuals working on the project knew the remit of each of their colleagues. The feedback was that this day was extremely useful to staff members and has impacted on how they record their outputs/outcomes. I've attached a sheet with info that other areas may find useful. Thanks Manchester!  View attachment
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