Newbury Business Today

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11th February 2010

Email: richard.maynard@newburynews.co.uk

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Richard Maynard talks to the chief executive of EBP West Berkshire, Amanda Richards

EDUCATION Business Partnership West Berkshire is an organisation dedicated to bringing businesses together with school-age young people for a variety of learning activities.
Based at New Greenham Park, it works hard to forge links between companies, teachers and pupils, as its chief executive, Amanda Richard, explained.
“As  an organisation, it’s been going for 17 years. I’ve been running it for seven of those years. It really has arisen from the Government’s determination to engage employers in the upskilling of young people in preparation for the workplace. The Government have gradually evolved how they engage with our agenda and how they make it work, with lots of different bodies out there who do make that happen.
“I think there’s a spotlight now back on the education business partnership organisations – they recognise that that have built up an incredible foundation of well-established links with the business sector. The Government is now very much supporting how we have evolved, but 17 years ago it was a different animal really.
“It was all local authority-government funded , whereas now it has developed into an organisation which seeks support from lots of different ways. We get sponsorship from companies, and support from trust funds. When you add up the volunteering hours that you get from people, it’s pretty incredible.
“It’s evolved now to something where we are much more centre-stage with the skills agenda. There is a Skills Taskforce that the Government has set up a partnership with businesses in the community and senior ministers, and it’s quite an influential group of people that are looking at us. The EBPs are well-represented within that task force.”
Amanda Richards admitted that most people probably knew about the EBP through its work experience programmes, which account for about 50 per cent of the organisation’s work. “We have what we call ‘block work experience’, where all students over the age of about 14 go out and have a week experiencing the workplace. That’s the foundation stone of our work experience work, but we’re doing more and more work in finding placements that are directly linked to their curriculum, supporting Diplomas and supporting BTEC studies that require direct employer engagement. That’s often done through work placement.
“We also find work placements for students who are maybe find it difficult to engage with school – they have what we call extended placements into the workplace to try to re-engage their understanding of why they are at school, to think about their actual studies.
“That’s 50 per cent of our work, and the rest falls into two main categories. One area is supporting the alternative curriculum, where you have these young people who are disengaged with school, who could be potentially ‘NEET’ (not in education, employment or training) students, and we run a programme which helps develop preparation for work skills and insight into employment. It has been very successful. The programme is very small but a year ago we had 26 out of 27 students, all of whom had been disengaged with school, who have not gone on to either further education or employment.
“That programme has grown, and we are now working with around 70 young people, and we hope that we can have a similar effect.
“The other area of our work is very much about developing thinking, personal development skills, attitudes, insights, enterprise skills, that help young people understand how the workplace applies all the things that they are getting at the moment in school. It used to be flagged under the heading of ‘enterprise’ but it’s no longer that, it’s personal development and thinking skills, but we are supporting the curriculum by engaging employers.
“I like to think of it as a two-way process. What I’ve talked about so far sounds like it all comes from the schools, but a lot of it is businesses wanting to interface with businesses and influence how young people are prepared for the workplace. It’s a wonderful opportunity for businesses to raise their profile in the region. A lot of employers work with us because they feel that. It also makes them a good place to work – if they are offering opportunities for their employees to do something which is very positive in their own communities where their families are at school, they are actually part of a two-way process when they engage with the work that we do.
“Think Big and Champions of Enterprise are two of the programmes that we run which are focusing very much on ‘Dragons Den’ style activities, but they allow young people to be creative in their thinking – thinking outside the box in terms of how they are developing their skills, working as a team, working at analysing data and how they can apply it to a new idea.
“They’re fantastic programmes. There are smaller things that we do, that are around them getting an insight into an industry which supports their curriculum.
“With the Champions of Enterprise scheme, we give young people a fictitious £100,000 and they have to look at how that would be used in the business environment, so they begin to understand the cost of renting a building, the cost of employing staff, the cost of  putting something together – what is left and the profit that they are going to get from it.
“We work with an advanced maths group, looking at how they apply their maths skills to everyday work. There is always lots of potential – I would love to work with more employers in helping young people improve their financial capability.
“One of the programmes that we run, that is sponsored by Vodafone, is Take A Chance. It’s an exceptional programme and they [Vodafone] have invested in it very well in helping us to develop a two-year programme with workshops and mentoring, to help young people who are of middle ability really realise their full potential and prepare themselves better for the future. It’s not just preparing them for the workplace, it’s maybe about getting them to engage with further and higher education, so that their insights and confidence about themselves is improved.
It’s a significant interface with young people – they do 10 workshops, and they have consistent mentoring running alongside the workshops, and it’s been fantastic. What we have developed here is going to be rolled out for other companies and other regions to take up. West Berkshire has hosted the pilot for it, with a roll-out to give lots of other businesses the opportunity to take advantage of our learning programmes.
“Another part of our work is Reading Buddies. We are always on the look-out for people who can just quietly spend half an hour a week with some young people, helping raise their confidence in numeracy or literacy. We’ve got quite a healthy programme of people who are willing to do that, through their local primary school. We have about 60 business volunteers, and we train them and CRB-check them so that they are prepared to go in, then we introduce them to a school and they happily carry on.”
Had the recession had an effect on EBP West Berkshire? “Yes. There is still significant willingness by individuals and employers out there to support out work in terms of giving time. Where we are struggling is stretching the budget to meet everything that people are wanting. There is a huge need for what we want, but less money to do what we want to do.
“We’ve got a small drop in business funding, but really everybody wants more for less. What’s happened is the Government has still got a spotlight on the work we do, and the demand for what we do is steadily increasing, but it’s how you best fund it. There’s a fair amount of statutory funding, but we do rely on business funding and trusts.
“Our biggest loss has been on work experience placements, because if companies are under stress, they don’t necessarily want to have to think about someone else.”
EBP is currently looking for a company to sponsor its flagship event, Think Big,  a very creative programme. (Financial support would be £8,000 to 10,000 per year but the company would also be involved in the delivery of it.
The organisation has a busy year ahead. There is a new programme developed with Sheepdrove called Young Chef, working with the organic farm and conference centre’s catering operation, Think Big, and EBP has also applied for funding to increase work with alternative curriculum.
Amanda Richards added: “An enormously successful programme that we are doing again is called Teamtech, on March 19, in the Madejski Stadium. About 300 young people will come face to face with people from the science, engineering and technology industry, with lots of hand-on opportunities. Maggie Philbin [the broadcaster] is the host for the day.”
Amanda Richards is in no doubt as to the value of the EBP’s work., especially Champions of Enterprise. “You are taking that learning from school and turning it into something practical and constructive, in terms of how they view the future and how they think for themselves and operate as an individual out there,” she said. “I wish I’d had that.
“It’s about applying your learning, and giving it real context. That’s why I do my job – it’s hard work, but the reason you do it is because you know that there’s such a positive outcome as a result of the graft that you do. Those gems of insight that you get from business volunteers that are shared with the young people and the teachers may influence somebody to think very differently about their learning, and about the choices they make for the future. It’s fertile ground to sow the seeds for a much more optimistic young person in our local community. These young people are going to be our future doctors, nurses or people working in our shops, so we want them to be locally proud and successful. All of these things help. The schools do an amazing job with their teaching, curriculum and qualifications, but ours takes it beyond that. We’re an important cog within that learning environment for those young people.”
For more information, visit www.wbebp.co.uk

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