Country report for the UK - Norton Radstock College

WP9 Long term potential
Country report for the UK
distance learning with tasks for teachers, video clips of activities and good
practice examples. Pilot feedback in WP5 supports this view.
In the UK, there is a wealth of material available to teachers concerning the
Skills for Life initiative. Our contact at LSIS helped us to upload details of the
Train the Trainer Pack on the Excellence Gateway, a national website
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/ for everyone who works in the post-16
learning and skills sector in England. This website provides resources,
support and advice and opportunities to participate and share good practice.
Our contact also suggested that we should try to include the Train the Trainer
Pack within the ‘embedding’ module which is an optional unit in the initial
teacher training course. Building on our dissemination activities, we plan to
continue to gain prominence for the LIFE products through the Excellence
Gateway and the eleven Centres for Excellence as guidance material for
embedding life skills. We have been invited to submit a case study on the
LIFE project on the Excellence Gateway which will be uploaded shortly.
Our research also showed that it could be difficult to make the Train the
Trainer Pack stand out as there are so many resources already available on
initiatives such as Skills for Life. There is also confusion over the labels
attached to these skills – they can be known as basic skills, core skills, key
skills and functional skills. We will therefore need to continue to disseminate
the Train the Trainer Pack with target groups to raise its profile in the UK.
We are investigating the potential for inclusion of the Train the Trainer Pack
on other key teacher trainer resource websites such as LSIS Employability
Skills, Intute, Teacher Training Resource Bank, Brainboxx and Teaching
Ideas (see References section for web links).
We have worked closely with our social partner, BSU, through regular
meetings to identify and make contact with key influencers in the VET sector.
BSU has also used every opportunity to disseminate the LIFE project at
meetings and conferences attended and prompt inclusion in teacher training
programmes. See WP8 UK dissemination report for more detail.
Our contacts felt that the LIFE products were very relevant to current VET
policy and could be used as part of teacher training materials and continuing
professional development (CPD). We will build on our LIFE pilot to include
the Train the Trainer Pack into initial teacher training and CPD programmes at
Norton Radstock College for over 100 staff and, through BSU promote the
Pack to other colleges, trainers and networks. We will also continue to lobby
for the LIFE standards to be included in any new standards written for
vocational teachers through our network of contacts.
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