Summary
TPM5
Report – The Opportunity Centre (Aspire-igen)
8th and 9th
March 2023
Day 1 :
Day 1 of the TPM involved all delegates
attending the Careers Live 2023 event delivered by The Opportunity Centre. Careers
Live is a bi-annual conference 2023 which took place on 8th March 2023 at Leeds
City Museum. It was the first face to face Careers Live since 2019, the 2021
event being on-line due to the constraints of the Covid -19 Pandemic.
Careers Live is run by our Shine Careers
team who provide careers education, information advice and guidance services to
schools, academies and colleges. It is important to them that our educators
have the opportunity to access the knowledge and networks that will enable them
to support our workforce of tomorrow.
In these post-Covid times, we are all too
well aware of the impact of the pandemic on young people’s outcomes, hence our
theme for the day, A Future for All, focusing on the need that nobody be left
behind.
The Career in VET delegates had the
opportunity to benefit from all presentations, and understand how careers
guidance is delivered and understood in the UK. With leading speakers from
across the country, it was a useful day for all.
After a welcome address from our Chief
Executive, Caroline Harrison, leading researcher and writer on career education
and guidance, Professor Tristram Hooley spoke about the challenges for careers
advisers following the pandemic, and the need for social justice within careers
guidance. Delegates took part in three workshops throughout the day. Leading on
from his keynote session, Tristram led a workshop on positioning careers
guidance within social justice.
David Andrews OBE, a leading expert on
careers education and guidance in schools and colleges, delivered a session on
leading an outstanding careers programme in your school or college, with Dr
Jonathan Hopwood-Lewis from the West Yorkshire Combined Authority delivering
workshops on regional and national labour market trends and future skills
demand.
Fotini Vlachaki, Career & Social
Inclusion Expert, Greece was due to deliver a keynote speech on Emerging
challenges for career guidance practice and the need for Socially-Emotionally
intelligent Career Guidance Practitioners but unfortunately the wi-fi worked
against us (we are grateful for her giving up her time even though she was not
able to present on the day).
Day 2:
The second day of the TPM was held in our
centre in York, which primarily delivers vocational training to 16-19 year
olds, as well as delivering a wide range of services to adults in the North
Yorkshire area. The Opportunity Centre York is the central office for our
Women’s Leadership and Management services, Adult numeracy programmes, and Lone
Parent support programmes – all which feature aspects of careers guidance and
development.
After a welcome slow morning – filled with
discussion and conversation covering the previous day’s event, The Opportunity
Centre team gave presentations on a number of different Erasmus+ project
delivered by the International team in York and other centre.
The projects included:
Stay+: A presentation was
given, as well as piloting of the new wellbeing app for young people. https://stayplusproject.eu/
A project to gamify positive behaviours of young
people during the pandemic and beyond. It seeks to provide an innovative
solution for VET professionals that have found it challenging to engage young
people (aged 15-21 years old) through the transition to online/distance
learning.
The
STAY+ Platform will be developed with the overarching objective of empowering
young people to become advocates of digital vocational training; with increased
awareness of a subject area, health and wellbeing, and how to maintain their
own motivation, manage their time and complete tasks.
YouthImpact+: A presentation,
as well as some piloting and evaluation of training modules developed in the
project. http://www.youthimpactplusproject.com/
The YouthImpact+ project is a
26-month Erasmus Key Action 2 project which aims to promote quality,
innovation, and recognition of youth work through the platform and outputs, as
this is an overarching theme and strategic objective of the 2019-2027 Youth
Goals.
Increasing and maintaining the
quality of Youth work across Europe is key to achieving the Youth Goals, and
this can be done by ensuring youth organisations and youth workers are able to
learn from each other by recognising and sharing good practices of other
European youth projects, increasing the quality of youth work, the skills,
competences and understanding of youth workers and in turn, facilitating high
quality opportunities and support for the youths engaged with them.
OTiGED: A Presentation
delivered, and discussion on the importance of the aims and objectives of the
projects. http://otiged.org/ https://theopportunitycentre.com/projects/otiged-autism-can-work/
Increasing the Productivity of
Autistic Young People and Supporting Their Transition to the Labour Market
Promoting equality and
diversity within employment can support the wider equality of those with disabilities
and increase awareness of the challenges individuals may face.
For this project, research will
be carried out to strongly support disabled people so that they can take part
in both working and social life more actively and comprehensively, to implement
the Disabled Job Coaching model in a systematic way, and to provide more
qualified service to people with autistic spectrum. In this respect, in order
for the project to produce sustainable outputs, the presence of active
stakeholders across our partner countries in Europe and their cooperation in
the process will contribute to the employment of autistic individuals in a
sustainable way.
After the
project presentations, we concluded the meeting and had a tour of the city of
York.
