sainsbury’s offers nationally recognised qualifications to entire workforce

Sainsbury's in Haywards Heath.

By Rachel Wood

rsowood@hotmail.com

 

Sainsbury’s is the first retailer and largest employer to give its entire workforce of 150,000 the opportunity to gain the equivalent of GCSE qualifications.

 

This move is in keeping with the government’s skills pledge – which Sainsbury’s signed last June – encouraging employers to invest in the skills and training of their workforce.  See background article for more information.

 

In Lord Sandy Leitch’s review of the UK’s long term skills needs in 2006, he found “…five million adults lack functional literacy and 17 million struggle with numbers.”

 

Sainsbury’s chief executive, Justin King, and Skills Secretary John Denham, launched the scheme today that aims to see 25% of its workforce have a nationally recognised qualification within the next five years.

 

Improving maths and English

 

The level 1 literacy and numeracy qualification – which is the equivalent to a D grade GCSE – will consolidate employees’s maths and English skills.

 

It is a web-based programme, so the students can improve their skills at their own pace.  A personal e-tutor is assigned to each employee when they enrol.

 

Recent research undertaken at RMIT University, highlighted confidence as a real barrier to learning, and so Sainsbury’s has made this training entirely confidential which can be done without any contact with peers and line managers.

 

Every employee will receive a certificate, and as added incentive to sign up, a £50 voucher will be issued to the first 2000 that complete the course.

 

Eleanor Davies, an employee at Sainsbury’s Hampton branch, welcomed this opportunity:  “I have worked at Sainsbury’s for twenty years, and think it’s only right they put something back into us”.

 

Vocational training

 

The giant supermarket will also be the first retailer to offer its’ staff the chance to gain an NVQ level 2 qualification, equivalent to five good GCSEs.

 

Sainsbury’s has agreed to work with an existing exam board EDI, to design a qualification that credits store-based skills such as stock control, visual merchandising and health and safety.

 

Sainsbury’s chief executive, Justin King, said:

 “This launch demonstrates that learning never stops at Sainsbury’s and every one of our colleagues can improve their skills, which not only benefits our customers, but also supports our colleagues to achieve their full potential”.

 

 

Click here to read the background article, which explains the government’s push for more skilled workers.

Click here to view my blog.

(Image courtesy of Jem)

 

Red Balloon Learning Centres : A Safe Haven from Bullies

By Rachel Wood

rsowood@hotmail.com

The issue of bullying in the workplace has been under the spotlight over the last couple of weeks, as the media, for example, UK newspaper, The Telegraph, have grappled with BBC Radio 2 presenters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s unfeeling behaviour towards Andrew Sachs.

Bullying remains a key issue in schools.

Anti-bullying policies in schools too are continually being re-defined and re-evaluated as the government seeks to wipe out what can be hugely detrimental to a child’s learning and future life.

 

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) supports schools in designing these anti-bullying policies – see background piece for more details.

 

In 1996, Educational consultant, Dr Carrie Herbert, sought to help the victims of bullying by setting up a charity to educate children who were missing school to avoid the bullies.

 

The first Red Balloon School 

 

Dr Herbert told BBC Radio 4’s ‘Midweek’ presenter, Libby Purves, about the story behind the first Red Balloon School.

 

Click here to listen to the podcast.

 

‘The Mail’s 2008 Inspirational Woman of the Year’ had been running an educational consultancy in 1995, whilst doing some anti-bullying work in schools, when she “kept coming across stories…of a child who had left a school because they had been bullied”.

 

Over the course of a year, Dr Herbert grew more frustrated at what she saw as the abandonment of bullied children:

“My rage is at the fact that we live in what is considered to be a first world country and we allow these children to drop through a net and nobody seems to pick them up and they [then] languish in their homes too frightened to leave their bedrooms”.

 

After giving an anti-bullying lecture, Dr Herbert was visited at her Cambridge home by “two traumatised parents who sat on [her] sofa with their daughter who had attempted suicide” and asked her for help.

 

The former English teacher immediately agreed to start teaching their daughter, Jenny, from Monday morning, and thus transform her house into a school.

 

Dr Herbert’s transformed home

 

In an interview with the UK newspaper, The Mail, Dr Herbert recalls: “Even as I was saying those words, I was wondering how on earth I was going to turn my small Victorian townhouse into a school in less than 48 hours”.

 

Dr Herbert quickly organised for a friend of hers, who was a teacher, to teach Jenny maths and physics and advertised for an art teacher’s post in the local newsagents.

 

A desk was placed in the sitting room, and as she told Radio 4 – “…my bedroom became the maths room, and my ensuite bathroom became the science room”. Her attic was then transformed into her bedroom.

 

Carrie Herbert’s resourcefulness is well-illustrated when she recalls the children coming across a dead mole on a walk, and suggests to the biology teacher to “cut that up and let the children have a look and see”. She laughs saying, “The mole ended up being cut up on the kitchen table”.

 

Within seven months, Jenny had nine other classmates, all of whom were aged between 12 and 16 years and had been severely bullied at their respective schools.

 

The school takes up to 15 pupils at one time, and when Radio 4 presenter, Libby Purves, asked Dr Herbert about the relationships between the pupils, she replied: “…they make hugely strong bonds across class, across race, across academic ability…it’s like a family”.

 

Since the Red Balloon School first started in November 1996, more than a hundred pupils have been helped, before later being reintegrated into mainstream school, in most cases after a year.

 

Dr Herbert is delighted at how successfully her former pupils have moved on to establish happy lives and budding careers. A former Red Balloon student graduated with a first from a London university last Summer.

 

Two other Red Balloon schools have been estabished in Norwich and Harrow, North-West London.

 

Fundraising has begun in order to open a new centre in Liverpool in memory of James Bulger.

 

Click here to go to the background article on school’s anti-bullying policies.  

Click here to view my blog.

(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Compulsory sex education for all schools

 

Primary school children to be taught sex education.

By Rachel Wood

rsowood@hotmail.com

Sex Education will form a compulsory part of the National Curriculum in primary and secondary schools in England.

Schools Minister, Jim Knight, has said that a new personal, social and health education curriculum (PSHE) has been prompted by “parents and young people telling us that sex education and indeed drug and alcohol education has not been good enough”.

 

East London head teacher, Sir Alasdair MacDonald, will lead the review into making PSHE education compulsory.

 

The details of the curriculum are yet to be broken down, but Jim Knight was quick to state that

 

“We are not suggesting that five and six-year-olds should be taught sex.  What we’re talking about for key stage 1 is children knowing about themselves, their differences, their friendships and how to manage their feelings”.

 

The new PSHE lessons will focus on lifestyle choices.  Knight outlined some details of a government review:

 

• Sex will be taught in the context of relationships and civil partnerships.
• Laws concerning drug misuse will be considered.
• Healthy living will be covered with an emphasis on nutrition and exercise.

 

Considering parents’s views

 

Knight pointed out that although the new PSHE lessons will form a “statutory programme of study…I think it is important that individual parents’s views are taken into account and their right to withdraw because of personal or moral views is respected”.

 

Catholic schools and other faith schools will have to adhere to the curriculum – including teaching concerning contraception, abortion and homosexuality – but they will be able to continue to share their own religious values about these issues.

 

Divided opinion

 

The Christian Insitute feels that “the plans will lead to the sexualisation of children and will undermine parents”.

 

Speaking to Sebastian Millett, a Catholic and father of two young girls, he fears that “a stigma might be attached” to his children if he withdraws them from these compulsory lessons.

 

The FPA (formerly the Family Planning Association), in contrast, applauds the government’s decision to introduce sex education to Key stages 1-4 on its website.

 

Here, Julie Bentley, FPA’s Chief Executive, says that “Research shows that sex and relationships education helps young people delay the time they first have sex, and promotes responsible and healthy choices when they do become sexually active”.

 

School leaders have expressed concern that by making PSHE compulsory, it could restrict an already overcrowded timetable.

 

Christine Blower, acting General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, has said “Quite simply, space has to be made for PSHE in the school day, and sufficient training and necessary specialist staff made available.”

 

Dr John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has raised the issue that “detailed prescription of what is to be taught…would be damaging to good and effective PSHE, which should always reflect the local context of the school.“

 

The new PSHE compulsory curriculum is expected by 2010.

 

Click here to read about what is currently taught as sex education.

 

Click here to view my blog.

 

(Image courtesy of Juan Keefe II)

Educational reforms in doubt after Adonis exit

By Rachel Wood

rsowood@hotmail.com

The Eastside Arts Academy was modelled on the successful BRIT school in South London, pictured above.

Long serving schools minister, Andrew Adonis, has controversially been ousted from his post in Gordon Brown’s cabinet reshuffle.

 

Since becoming an advisor to former Prime Minister Tony Blair ten years ago, Lord Adonis has pushed for greater diversity in the state system through special ‘academies’ and results-raising initiatives.  See background piece below.

Academies aimed to revolutionise educational performance in disadvantaged areas in England.  They were partly funded by external businesses to curtail the high costs to the government’s budget, and were also granted greater independence. 

 

Eastside Arts Academy

 

Adonis was adamant these new academies would be “sponsored by successful individuals, trusts and educational organisations” in order to raise the standards and aspirations of the young people involved.  The Eastside Arts Academy in Birmingham, for example, was sponsored by Ormiston Trust and modelled on the highly successful BRIT School in South London.

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP was commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to conduct an independent five year evaluation of the Academies programme. The latest annual report last year, showed the academies as significantly contributing to educational programmes.  The report also revealed above-average improvements in GCSE results. 

Despite these developments, Lord Adonis’s role has been switched to Minister of Transport, a role with which, political writer, Bill Jones, feels, Adonis has “no familiarity whatsoever, or indeed, affinity”. 

 

Academies’s future

 

The DCSF claim that the government are still committed to building 400 new academies in the next four years.  But oppositional parties strongly suspect that it was Schools Secretary Ed Balls who forced Lord Adonis out, largely due to his sceptism of the academies programme.

Liberal Democrats Children’s Spokesman, David Laws, laments what he sees to be the end of this educational reform:  “The real losers here will be thousands of children in some of the poorest parts of the country who were being targeted by the academies programme.” 

 

Click here to read about Lord Adonis’s contribution as schools minister.

Click here to go to my blog.

(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)