Equal - Digital Repository

Background

GEL is a £3.6 million project delivered by Gloucestershire Neighbourhood College (GNC) and Gloucestershire eNeighbourhood Projects Network. The project has been working across the ten neighbourhood projects in GLoucestershire with a population of around 100,000 people.  It has enabled GNC to work with learners and residents to decide what kind of training and skills are needed in each neighbourhood, thereby improving provision to make learning a better experience and making learning more relevant and appealing, resulting in higher success rates.

GEL is designed:

•  to help people in local communities to get involved in running their own college (Governance)
• for local people to improve their college and then help others gain the confidence to get involved (Empowerment)
• to make sure that people aged 16-30 and those aged over 50 can learn and make progress (Learning). 
    

Aims
To address the systemic failure to engage hard-to-reach learners in ten target neighbourhoods by seeking alternative means to address these unmet needs by developing new engagement techniques

Objectives

• To test strategies to empower hard-to-reach learners through community governance of neighbourhood curriculum.
• To pilot planning processes and practices to identify the most effective ways to develop neighbourhood curricula.
• To establish whether local community governance improves the engagement and retention of hard-to-reach learners, their qualification rates and their progression into employment.
• To test the most effective use of learning incentives with hard-to-reach learner groups.

• Developing and testing a range of new student recruitment tools, focusing on young learners (16 –30) and older learners (50+) on peripheral and rural social housing estates.
• Researching and testing a range of new non-financial incentives and evaluating their success at engaging and retaining hard to reach learner groups.
• Developing and testing new community curricula planning tools to enable the target beneficiary groups to lead the development of their neighbourhood curriculum.
• Testing and evaluating the effectiveness of curriculum planning processes in the retention of hard to reach learners, their empowerment and their progression to sustainable employment.
• Comparing and contrasting the above outputs with curricula planned and developed by conventional methods.
• Enabling socially excluded groups to manage the development of local learning opportunities and testing whether they are more effective in terms of engagement and retention in learning, empowerment and progression into employment

Target Groups

• young people aged 16 to 30
• older people over the age of 50.