Invitation to West London's FE and Adult Colleges to participate in the delivery of West London Working's 'Building Employability Pathways' work package
Frequently Asked Questions
1.Is there a pro-forma for the expression of interest?
No there is not a pro-forma for your expression of interest. We would like you to address the following:
•your previous work in integrating employment and skills.
i.e. any partnership working with Skills for Jobs, DWP, LDA, EDP providers or any other work that you have carried but not necessarily funded through the LSC;
•specific support that you need from consultants in enabling you to create employability pathways.
This could be around your understanding of employability, how you address it operationally as well as strategically, and what are your current gaps or constraints; a brief needs analysis would help. This should include support in developing pathways for all learners that have an ambition of moving into work, as well as specific support to assist you to deliver the Pathways for Parents pilot.
•the ways in which you would like to deliver employability pathways for Parents (see Briefing for more details).
This should include some indication of volumes, how you currently work with the target group, the kind of assistance that you propose to give, details of any sector focus, geographical focus, or any further definition to the parent target group. It should also provide information on the partners that you would like to engage with in the Employability Pathways and any early ideas you have with respect to the Routeway Broker role. There will be the opportunity to further define your Pathways for Parents with support from the West London Working consultants.
2.Is funding just for a consultant to work with us, or is there also money for delivery? If not, would the funding for delivery be expected to come from the provision of funded qualifications and which of our budgets are you anticipating this comes from (presumably ALR)?
There is only a small amount of seedcorn funding to support the implementation of Employability Pathways. We do not expect this funding to fund courses or qualifications. As you have rightly said the course/qualification funding is anticipated through your mainstream delivery or through any other already funded through other initiatives (synergies). The seedcorn funding could cover a contribution towards staff costs or marketing material etc. required to deliver Pathways for Parents that cannot be met elsewhere. Please note that West London Working is buying Consultant services separately, so you are not expected to pay for the Consultant's support.
3.What kind of volumes (numbers of participants per provider) and amount of funding are you anticipating would be involved? Or is it up to us to say what we can do and what we need?
We are very much hoping the Pathways for Parents to be value added to the services Providers are already delivering to this target group. The whole point of this support package is to build on Providers' existing work of embedding employability, of which delivering customised employability pathways to parents is an integral part. Therefore, we would like to hear from you about your existing work, including volumes and any "additional" costs that you may incur as a result of delivering the specified outcomes to this target group or in developing referrals between progression pathway providers. The Pathways for Parents are a pilot that we would like you to use as a model with other cohorts of learners. You need to ensure that the volume of participants that you suggest will be enough for you to be able to assess the impact of delivering this model, and provide sufficient guidance if you were to roll this approach out to other learner cohorts.
4.Presumably the project would require us to make closer links with local Job Centre Plus offices – I would imagine that they are aware of this and would welcome such closer working?
Yes, very much so. Jobcentre Plus was involved in designing this initiative and is represented on it's Project Board. However, the local offices will not yet be briefed about this initiative. We will make sure that this happens when delivery starts.
