Further education partnerships bring immediate benefits to colleges
Two CIMSPA Further Education Partners explain how partnership has added value for their team, their learners and employers in the local area
At one of our regional further education webinars, City College Norwich and Yeovil College spoke about why they became CIMSPA Further Education Partners and how they have taken advantage of the partner benefits so far. Here, we share their stories and thoughts on how valuable partnership can be for further education providers.
Discover the benefits of CIMSPA FE partnership
City College Norwich
“We officially started on our CIMSPA journey at the start of this academic year and it’s been really exciting so far.
We became aware of the CIMSPA further education partnership opportunity through the Association of Colleges sport conference, where CIMSPA gave a presentation about their local skills work and the data that that was providing in terms of skills gaps. I was able to take the information back to the college and use it as part of my curriculum planning.
While Norfolk isn’t yet involved in the local skills project, we decided to get ahead of the curve and that this was the time to change and remodel our curriculum offer to align with CIMSPA’s work.
One of City College Norwich’s key strategic aims is partnership. We want to develop our curriculums to meet the area’s community and economic needs through creating a skilled workforce.
What we’ve found really valuable within the partnership is the relationship we’ve formed with the CIMSPA team. They offer a personalised approach and a critical friend that we can call on to check concepts, bounce ideas off and understand what trends are happening in the sector. It’s been really helpful and important for our work.
For example, during our Ofsted visit, Micki Ruggins, Technical Education Officer at CIMSPA, was able to talk to the skills inspector about our partnership and how it will help us to shape our curriculum moving forward to support our local community and workforce.
In terms of wider benefits, the termly further education forum has been really helpful for sharing and learning good practice as well as understanding future challenges and opportunities. I’m currently using the Data Lens platform to support with our curriculum planning in terms of justifying our courses, their intent and pathways for students afterwards. It’s been really helpful to be able to dig down into local districts and understand the landscapes we are working with.
We’ve also embedded the CIMSPA careers guidance course into some of our personal development frameworks. It’s been great for making our advice more specific to support students on their career journeys. We have students and staff completing qualifications through the Inclusivity Skills Project, and the bulletin is a helpful touchpoint to check in with and share with our students, too.
We are currently looking at CIMSPA membership options for both staff and students to allow them to complete bespoke CPD. This would really help them moving forwards in terms of career progression and for students to gain work placements. We are working towards developing a specific employer pathway around a professional qualification to make sure that we’ve got a broader range of exit routes for students.”
Yeovil College
“I first met with our local skills hub manager last spring. We discussed CIMSPA’s work and joining the local skills accountability board (LSAB), initially. Straight away, I thought that this would tick a lot of boxes for Ofsted. Since then, we’ve become a CIMSPA Further Education Partner and have been working with the LSAB to build better links with employers. We can clearly see how these relationships are going to support us to establish more links with local employers across the county.
As a college, we feel that the mission and values of CIMSPA align really well with our own. In particular, the values of supporting individuals to fulfil their potential, providing employers with the best possible people and ensuring that relevant learning and development is available particularly resonated with us. That’s really important to us when forming a partnership.
We are also really excited about CIMSPA’s workforce registration scheme project and aligning the sport and physical activity sector with the health sector. We feel that having a professional body is really important to ensure our sector is regulated and competent. We want to play a role in making sure that sports coaches and fitness instructors are safe and have the correct qualifications.
Through our further education partnership with CIMSPA, we have gained real value in ensuring that the qualifications we are delivering – and the way that we are delivering those qualifications – are aligned with the sector professional standards. This has had a big impact on our day-to-day and supports our programme leads as they look at existing and future curriculums. We’ve also reviewed how we design lessons and schemes of work to identify what is directly linked to professional standards. Where we’ve found gaps, we have looked to fill those.
The careers advice and guidance that we have gained access to has been extremely valuable. Teachers have been able to build it into their curriculum, deliver sessions with learners and use a lot of the data and career pathways information such as next steps and job opportunities. It’s supported us to rationalise and justify our curriculum and its intent and design.
The college has also been able to look at existing qualifications through a different lens. In the past, we’ve been very traditional and haven’t critically reviewed our qualifications to see what delivers well and what doesn’t. With the support and conversations we’ve had with CIMSPA, we’ve been able to build our offering around what learners and employers need using the professional standards and LSAB data to prepare for the 20267/27 education reforms.
We have taken the opportunity to work with CIMSPA to improve our resistance provision and, with a longer-term view, how we deliver qualifications in general. The partnership has given our team a lot of perspective – having information to hand has helped the college’s programme leads to rationalise and consider their next steps. In some cases, we are moving away from the traditional BTEC extended diploma and looking at some of the technical skills qualifications as alternatives, which marks a real shift for us as a department and college.
The values and mission of CIMSPA perfectly match what we’re being asked to do as a further education provider. Our partnership will help us to change the curriculum in the coming years and on a day-to-day basis it’s allowed our teachers to be far more informed. They are able to check their curriculum plans, lessons and designs to ensure that it matches the professional standards, and where it doesn’t, they can identify opportunities to build them in and make sure that our learners are as prepared as possible.”
