Mary Ward Centre has a particular focus on working with those furthest from education and learning. This project has enabled us to provide IT and digital skills courses, supported by work experience in our in-house design studio. Our approach is user friendly, making learning accessible to those further from education, and with tailor made support to help students succeed. The project has grown our capacity and the diversity of our offer, enabling us to work with more Londoners, giving them the skills to enter the workforce.
We also wanted to build the capacity of our social enterprise – Create Space: a design agency nestled inside the Blackfriars Settlement and run by a lead colleague and several volunteers all who have mental health conditions and are looking to build experience and confidence with us before hopefully entering the sector. They were in need of more advanced workshops, new kit and a simulated workspace together with employer links and support from professionals in the industry.
We have always been very clear that our role in the partnership was to work with those likely to be furthest from education, from the creative digital sector, and those who perhaps never envisaged that this sector could ‘be for them’. Our intention was to create engaging taster sessions – and through community outreach – talk to potential learners, challenging perceptions about creative digital and encouraging first steps into learning in this area. We proposed being a pathway into other providers as learners progressed. It was also an opportunity for us to utilise tutors with a breadth of skills to really expand further into these areas of learning.
Challenges have included the very short timescales, limiting our ability to consult fully with the communities we serve, the volume of tasters we could offer and the availability for tutors to access further training. We are a very lean organisation and therefore a project lead and a team of people to run this exclusively was not an option for us, therefore leading to real pressure on the senior team to meet challenging short-term deadlines for the volume of paperwork involved.
Perceptions that creative digital learning could only be carried out by someone with a higher level of understanding of the sector or the IT packages was a myth we actively dispelled as much as possible, but this still had a bearing on people’s levels of interest as did the ‘no cost’ element of the courses.
