The document discusses opportunities and challenges around coordinating education and career support projects across East Anglia, which contains 3 of the UK's 12 Opportunity Areas. It notes that while there is significant investment in the region, challenges include coordinating different projects that operate on different timelines and goals. It proposes building a network between partners to create a more joined-up and coherent education and career support offer for young people, with one central coordinator, to help navigate the system more effectively and efficiently.
2. Opportunities and challenges
• East Anglia NCOP – 74 target wards; c.£9.2M funding to December
2018; c.100 target schools; rural, coastal, urban deprivation
• 3 of the 12 DfE Opportunity Areas – Norwich; Ipswich; East
Cambridgeshire and Fenland
• Significant levels of investment in region: partnership working
essential for coherence and sustainability
• Challenges of coordinating different projects, operating to different
timescales with different targets and objectives across multiple
partners
4. So how can we improve the offer?
There are many groups working with similar goals in the same space
In Norwich, we are working with neaco to coordinate with other key partners, NCS and CEC, who
are supporting young people with decisions about their education and careers after they leave
school.
Through building a network with other partners with similar goals, we are looking to:
• Make one joined up approach to schools to ensure that there is one coherent offer
• Help young people navigate the system effectively
• Increase the efficiency of the system by identifying a central co-ordinator to ensure that
the offer of each organisation is joined up
Across the 3 OAs there are 13 Priority A schools; 11 Priority B and 4 Priority C schools, as well as two FEC partners – over ¼ of all our targets
Norwich OA was one of the 6 announced before Christmas so further ahead. Reps from neaco partner HEIs represented on Partnership Board, Stakeholder Group and Working Groups
The Programme Director for the Norwich OA is on the Norwich neaco Advisory Group
Norwich has established 4 strands of focus, of which ‘Advice Transitions and Destinations’ is one – one objective of this strand is to support the work of neaco.
WG agree importance of presenting a coherent, coordinated offering to OA target schools, and providing input that makes schools lives easier, not more complicated – not generating more work for them!
View of local Headteacher on WG that what is needed most is ‘more support and less challenge’; CPD for teaching staff of all levels; support and input to improve whole schools
Going forward large part of my role as lead for neaco will be working with OAs, CEC, NCS, LEPs to embed neaco as one part of a wider regional strategy to improve educational outcomes for young people
A network between the 3 would provide the greatest impact for young people
How it feels to schools – When we first starting speaking to people about their plans in Norwich, we found that the activity that they were planning was very similar, even if the precise objectives were different. We are very concerned that schools will not feel able to engage effectively with several organisations at once, even where their offers are good. We therefore want to make sure that all of these organisations are approaching schools with one coherent offer of support for things that they often find difficult.
How it feels to young people – Whilst we may think about this challenge as supporting lots of different choices that young people are making – whether to go to university; what career to pursue; how to spend a summer or gap year – it is likely that young people are thinking about them as all part of a set of quite challenging decisions that they need to make about the period of their life between 16-21 years old. These decision are also all linked – for example the choice about whether to go to university will be informed by a young person’s career ambitions and self-confidence, amongst other things – so we need to help young people navigate the whole effectively
Practical steps to make the whole system efficient – if three organisations are asking schools to identify a coordinator, it probably makes sense for it to be the same person for all of the organisations. Similarly, if there is a need to identify a day where pupils are taken out of lessons to consider choices about their future, we should make sure they have all fo the relevant information on the same day. For these practical reasons, we need all of these organisations to be working together to create the right package of support