Jackie Hartley’s BLOG

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So there was me thinking my 50th birthday would slip by unnoticed… Arrived at the university on Friday (the one day a week I work there) to find my workmates had covered my desk in […]

I have just been preparing a training session which I am running this weekend, on preparing young people for Higher Education and was going over the statistics again. I wanted to check that the non-completion rate for starters in Higher Education was still running at around 15%. According to the HE funding councils Performance indicators […]

The final workshop I attended was run by Naomi Brandham and Rachel Piper from Barking and Dagenham and looked at the work they were doing to get a Personal Development Curriculum developed and delivered in the 9 secondary schools on their patch. It was a really interesting session. They began by setting the economic and […]

It’s ironic that in this workshop, following immediately on the heels of the QCA stuff, was devoted to showing us a fully developed personal development programme and sophisticated online staff planning tool. Doesn’t anyone in those great policy making towers in the sky look at work like this, done by practitioners? Clearly Cambridgeshire have worked […]

I cannot begin to describe how angry and depressed I felt after the input from QCA. The talk outlined the work QCA are doing on developing a framework for the Personal Development Curriculum and nothing much had changed since the last time it was outlined at the ACEG conference. To start with, in the QCA […]

This session was led by the two consultants from Mouchelparkman (a private consultancy brought in by the DfES) who have been working on putting together the national quality standards for IAG. These are the standards that anyone bidding to offer the careers/IAG work (in other words, the commissioned providers) will have to prove they can […]

Katie Dixon started her workshop on the Personal Development Curriculum by talking about her patch, my old patch, Stoke on Trent. According to various reports and statistics Stoke is still an area of low aspirations, low attainment, high NEETs numbers and, apparently the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the UK. Apart from the last point […]

The next speaker, Rob Ward, works for the Centre for Recording Achievement and he talked about the importance of hanging onto the recording achievement/progress file processes and good practice even though the Progress File has been dropped by the DfES. He described the way the DfES dropped the Progress File, saying that… ‘the principles and […]

Before lunch I ran an optional workshop, just updating interested parties in our latest products. About 20 people turned up, including a lot of familiar friendly faces so that was nice and, even better, I played one round of Chick in the City with them and afterwards a few came up to say how much […]

The conference kicked off with David giving another of his famous ‘overview of the current situation’ talks, which in places reflected his input at the ACEG conference. Mind you his opener summed things up - ‘CEG stays the same, it’s just the context in which it is delivered which keeps changing’. How true and how […]