About the Provider

Essex County Council Adult Community Learning offer a wide range of leisure and vocational courses to over 30,000 learners across the county of Essex in both urban and outreach settings.They also have a Vocational Training Centre that delivers both accredited and non accredited programmes in areas such as Business Administration, Customer Services, Health and Social, Support Work in Schools, Team Leading and Management.

About the Practitioners

Sam Butler offers Functional Maths and English support for groups of 16-18 learners on Traineeship Programmes. Their placements include libraries, childcare, sports and fitness venues and garages. Sam also offers English and maths support to learners on apprenticeship programmes in Business Administration, Management, Health and Social Care. Sam works in both Witham and Basildon and has access to an interactive whiteboard and PCs in her classes.

Ann Siveyer is both an Assessor and Functional Skills tutor on Business Administration and Health and Social Care Adult Apprenticeships. She works in Colchester and at County Hall in Chelmsford and generally is much more limited in her access to IT facilities.

The challenge

At the start of the project Sam and Ann met with their mentor, Bob Read, and highlighted different ways in which they felt digital technology might help them meet the challenges they faced in their teaching. They said they were keen to:

make their teaching more interactive and motivating for all their learners but especially younger learners as the limit of 20 hrs support means that learners have to be engaged and focussed from the outset if they are to have a chance of passing the Functional Skills exam;
find or create digital resources that learners might be able to access between sessions as many learners do not currently take an interest in any homework activities;
use their Moodle more effectively to organise and share their teaching resources
develop and pilot an electronic ILP;
explore remote support using video conferencing platforms such as Skype.

Click below to hear a clip in which Sam talks about her interest in exploring learning technology (Click here for a transcript.) –

Engaging employers and senior managers

Sam and Ann were supported in their project activities by Jo Loss, Functional Skills Co-ordinator and Maria Neary (left), the Curriculum Manager for Quality, Workforce & Curriculum Development. Both Jo and Maria are involved in actively promoting the use of e learning across the service and were keen for Sam and Ann each to involve one of their apprenticeship employers in arranging for candidates to have remote support using learning technology e.g. video conferencing, screencasting. They also worked with Sam and Ann in developing the use of an electronic ILP which they hoped would enable employers to become more involved in monitoring candidate progress and contributing to reviews.