Are you ready to "engage, listen to and respond to your local community?"
The recent release of the interim Report from the Independent Commissions on Colleges in their Communities calls for Colleges of FE to "set out how they will engage, listen to and respond to their communities" and expects them to "work closely with sector representative bodies to develop a common approach to providing public information to the communities they serve".
EMFEC and One East Midlands are facilitating a series of regional dialogues, looking at local responses to some of the wider strategic debates associated with the Colleges in their Communities Inquiry and the future of Informal Adult and Community Learning, which are currently in progress.
These dialogues will be informed by the work of the LSIS funded Forward Communities project which is examining relationships between the Voluntary & Community Sector and Colleges of FE at a regional level. They will also link to the work of the Third Sector National Learning Alliance (TSNLA) in identifying the challenges facing the Further Education Sector and how Colleges of FE can work more effectively with Third Sector organisations.
You can help inform and influence the way in which College of FE and the Voluntary and Community Sector work together by completing a short survey.
The survey will form part of the information gathering for the project and the regional dialogues. EMFEC invites you to engage with the work we will be undertaking with One East Midlands and the Forward Communities project in the coming months and to contribute feedback on good practice as well as barriers to greater collaboration between the two sectors.
The survey can be accessed here
If you would like further information on the Forward Communities project please contact:
Simon Feneley
Director of College and Provider Services, EMFEC
Jayne Quantrill,
Learning & Skills Development Officer
One East Midlands