Workers' Education Association - Adding Value and Currency to Community Courses
The WEA and other voluntary and community sector providers organise and deliver courses to hard-to-reach groups in community settings. In order to ease the progression for learners WEA wish to model progression agreements from their sector (Health and Social Care related to supporting families) to both FE and HE. Some of these learners do progress to level 3 courses in mainstream FE and also a variety of foundation degrees and foundation programmes in HE but at the moment there are no formalised arrangements.
The project will include three connected activities:
a) Developing a progression agreement between some of the family provision and programmes at different FE and HE institutions. WEA work throughout West Yorkshire so it is important that learners can access progression locally. WEA also want to give their learners a choice of progression routes as the level 2 programmes within family learning have quite broad learning outcomes;
b) Scoping with a selection of providers who would be interested in exploring a progression agreement/protocol arrangement regarding pathways from non accredited provision which may be pitched at levels 2 or 3 – curriculum area to be determined;
c) Developing online mapping of pathway for adults starting at entry level in the general area of family support/parenting through to level 4 provision. This resource to be open to all and its existence disseminated round appropriate sectors. WEA will explore ways of making sure that this resource could be updated annually in line with changing provision.
Through this project WEA hope to acheive the following outcomes:
> establish progression agreements with different institutions in West Yorkshire to support the progression of WEA and other community learners;
> discuss with mainstream providers the progression of learners who are on non accredited courses which are being delivered at the equivalent of levels 2 / 3;
> develop online mapping of pathways for adults' community courses under the broad umbrella of parenting and family support;
> WEA as an organisation would gain a greater understanding of progression routes and other providers would have an increased awareness of their role in learning pathways;
> WEA would embed progression in their curriculum and establish long term links with those organisations that can help our learners to progress.
For further details of this project contact Jenny Major at jmajor@wea.org.uk
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