Faiths and further education - Church of England

Faiths and Further Education:A HandbookForewordThe Whole-college Approach to FE ChaplaincyRuth Silver OBE, Chair of the NEAFE and LSC Working GroupDear colleaguesAs the principal of a large and varied further education college inmulti-cultural South East London, I have everyday experience of theissues facing today’s students who seek to develop the necessaryknowledge, skills and self-confidence for a successful career intoday’s and tomorrow’s workforce, and the staff who support them,including their tutors.Of course, education is more than preparing people foremployment and employability.Those of us who have spent ourown working lives in the further education sector know that wealso have a wider and deeper duty.This is to help our students andstaff to develop a sense of well-being that is the foundation of theemotional resilience needed to deal positively with whateverchallenges their careers and their lives ask of them.This is the approach that NEAFE and the Faiths in FE Forum hopewill continue in colleges where chaplaincy is in the process ofstarting or taking root. Most importantly, while chaplaincy itselfmay have sometimes been seen as an activity ‘separate’ from acollege’s main academic and management and administrativesystems, NEAFE believes it is important to encourage an integrated,whole-college, multi-faith approach to chaplaincy, involving theprincipal, managers and teaching staff, as well as the chaplaincyteam and the faith communities.The degree of formality and depth of detail in this partnership isquite simply what this Handbook is about. Each college has its ownethos and context, and its own priorities.This Handbook thereforeseeks to offer some general guidance and specific illustrationsdrawn from actual chaplaincy partnerships and agreements, whichwe hope will be of use in colleges, especially where chaplaincy isyet to be fully established.We are most grateful to the LSC forfunding and supporting this initiative.This sense of well-being will derive from many sources.Academicand vocational success will be one.Another that the furthereducation sector has addressed, and sometimes, for many reasonsincluding time and resources, has not, will be deeper issues that formany people are encapsulated in the term ‘spiritual’. Suchspirituality, as the discussion of the term at the end of Section 1shows, can be – and sometimes is not – attached to variousreligious traditions.This LSC and NEAFE chaplaincy initiative is about meeting studentneed, not proselytising. In the colleges where chaplaincy issuccessful and long-established, it is seen as part of, andcontributing to, what colleges are already doing in terms of thespiritual development of students, both explicit and implicit.