Link Up A Skills for Life Initiative

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Link Up A Skills for Life Initiative
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Skills for Life

• Boosting demand
• Raising standards

• Ensuring capacity
• Learner achievement

Delivering Higher Standards To find better ways
of harnessing (volunteers) commitment and
enthusiasm in the classroom and . . . explore
ways of using volunteer helpers more creatively .
. . outside the learning context Skills for
Life, 2001 p. 52
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The Link Up Project

• Funded by the DfES and Home Office
• 18 regional projects two in the Prison Service
  and one in the Army
• Target to recruit 6000 Supporters
• Living and working in disadvantaged wards
• Diversity / variety of roles

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What is Link Up?
Voluntary and Community Sector Capacity
Building
Volunteering
Skills for Life
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Link Up Supporters are different because

• They are
• Living and/or working in the communities
• In touch with hard to reach groups
• Developing own skills as well as re-engaging
  others with learning

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What do they do?

• With potential learners
• identify
• screen informal and formal
• awareness of learning opportunities
• signpost
• With learners
• support literacy, numeracy and language skill
  development

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Training Framework
Unit One Working in the Sector (12 hours)
Basic Skills Support
Lit / Num Level 2 Tests
PLACEMENT
Unit Two Supporting Learners (12 hours)
Unit Three Specialist options (12 hours)
LITERACY
NUMERACY
ESOL
PROGRESSION TO LEVEL 3 AND LEVEL 4
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Link Up the model

• Supporter recruitment
• Supporter management and support
• Working in partnership
• Responding to context

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Remote Model

• Army
• Voluntary and Community Sector
• LearnDirect

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Achievements

• Recruited over 6,400 Link Up Supporters Over 40
  progressed to complete the full qualification
• Over 550 supporters have passed the National
  Tests at Level 2
• Developed and piloted a new national
  qualification
• Worked with over 400 diverse organisations, many
  in the VCS

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Contribution to national, regional and local
strategies

• Skills for Life
• 21st Century Skills
• Widening Participation
• Neighbourhood Renewal
• Community Cohesion
• Voluntary and Community Sector Capacity Building
  Working Together

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More than a qualification

• Focuses on deprived communities
• Tackles a major cause of poverty
• Helps local people to help themselves and their
  neighbours
• Gets away from the more traditional and distant
  organs of the state
• Volunteers build bridges between the community
  and the more formal sector

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Taking the Model forward

• Project to mainstream
• Other areas
• Dissemination
• Contextualisation