Faiths and further education - Church of England

11Models of college chaplaincy provision17Section 2 examines a number of important background issues insetting up a chaplaincy, from definitions of spirituality to differentroles involved in being a chaplain. It also raises the issue of thedifferent models of chaplaincy or faith teams which have beenfound in chaplaincies across the country. Some of these are morecharacteristic of the large inner-city colleges, others of the smallercolleges outside the major conurbations.The main models arebriefly set out below.18Chaplaincy was first developed in FE colleges in the 1970s and1980s.Two models predominated, both of which have been foundunsatisfactory as chaplaincy has developed and become more fullyintegrated into college provision over the past 10 to 15 years:• the ‘visiting vicar or minister’ model, in which the minister from alocal church – usually Anglican and/or Methodist – madeoccasional visits to the college, participated in festivals , collegeevents and so on, and hosted a carol service at Christmas• the ‘on-call’ model, in which the college maintains a list of localministers who were on call in case of need, in a studentemergency or other situation.• Half-time chaplaincy team leaders are becoming the mostcommon model, usually with an ecumenical and/or multi-faithteam, often mainly comprised of lay volunteers, although wherethere are significant minorities such as Muslims, some collegesare prepared to pay additional part-time hours for a Muslimchaplain, and even, in certain cases, male and female chaplains.Some half-time chaplain posts are combined with another half ornear half-time post with outside funding, such as regional ordiocesan FE or faith officer, chaplaincy officer, or an in-houseteaching or counselling post, enrichment activities co-ordinatorand so on• Part-time team chaplaincies are probably the most commonmodel of paid chaplaincy, usually with a variety of fundingmechanisms and some volunteer input. In this model, thechaplaincy co-ordinator may be from a faith community or maybe a member of college staff with a particular interest inchaplaincy (in one or two cases, a student services co-ordinator)with a time allocation for this work• Part-time individual chaplaincies are either paid by the college,or by a church (usually an allocation of one or two days a week),or by a combination of the two. Some such chaplains have in thepast had advisory boards of ministers or other faith leaders or layvolunteers, but increasingly these are being integrated into thechaplaincy team.19Clearly the major problems for colleges with these models havebeen, first, the absence of a regular presence in colleges, and,second, that they are both church-based models, depending foreffectiveness on the goodwill of ministers with full-time churchposts in the neighbourhood. In mosques, gurdwaras and so on,leaders are mainly in full-time secular employment.The model isfast disappearing, and even where it has developed in a multi-faithform, it has rarely been found to work satisfactorily by eithercolleges or faith communities.20The more recent models of chaplaincy all include a permanentchaplaincy presence in college, of which the following are the mainvariants:• Full-time chaplains, with or without additional team membersfrom different denominations and faith communities, are foundin a number of larger colleges, with the college either paying thefull salary (usually partially defraying costs through a teaching orcounselling role)