Faiths and further education - Church of England

Faiths and Further Education:A HandbookFunding21As is clear from the models described above, a variety of fundingpossibilities exists, ranging from fully funded by the college(sometimes with smaller colleges partially defrayed by teachinghours) to part-funded by a church or ecumenical body (sometimesin the form of a minister’s post with a job description allocating,say, 50 per cent of the time to the local college).“We started with an all-voluntary team. But eventuallyit was the principal who wanted to introduce paidsessions. He thought he would get more continuityand commitment to the college.” (Chaplain)22Combination funding is the commonest funding model forchaplaincy teams, particularly where lay volunteers (for example,former teachers or FE lecturers) are willing to contribute time.Asmall number of posts are funded by ecumenical organisations (forexample, a local ecumenical partnership, Churches Togetherinitiative, or a local Church Trust) which may have education as oneof its funding criteria.The LSC does not fund chaplaincy, but hasfunded, both at regional and local level, college or faith communitypartnership projects or multi-faith chaplaincy developmentprojects, provided they can be clearly shown to be start-up ordevelopmental work, targeting disadvantaged or hard-to-reachpeople or people who are not in education, employment or training(NEET).Output24Most colleges that commented publicly about their experience ofchaplaincy rate it very highly. For those who responded to surveysin 2003, funded by the LSC and distributed by the AoC, studentretention, outreach and recruitment from new groups of studentswere the most frequently mentioned areas of benefit.25Three principals have written more extensively about theirexperience of chaplaincy in the Journal of Chaplaincy in FurtherEducation.• Student welfare and spiritual and moral development was themajor area identified in an article in the January 2005 issue.• Promotion of harmony among students in dividedcommunities was the main trigger for a principal (also writing inthe January 2005 issue) who set up a new chaplaincy in 2004.• College ethos and the bottom line (student recruitment) werethe two main arguments used in an article in the September2005 issue, although the article provided a comprehensiveoverview of chaplaincy in a college. It is reproduced as Annex Hto this Handbook.Awards23There is an Association of Colleges (AoC) Beacon Award funded bythe churches, and NEAFE has also instituted a set of annual awards.Both of these have broader aims than chaplaincy, thoughchaplaincy could be developed as a partial outcome of one of theseawards.