European Approaches to Integrated Communities
Start date: Sep 5, 2016,
End date: Sep 4, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
European Approaches to Integrated Communities (EURAIC) is a one year mobility project for staff engaged in vocational education and training (VET). At it's heart is the is the Government's Prevent Duty for England and Wales. Educational organisations must comply with the Prevent duty and take a due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. Indeed, in England this is now a mandatory part of the OfSTED inspection for Further Education (FE) colleges. Surrounding this, however, are the wider issues that support Prevent in FE colleges - namely equality and diversity, inclusion and safeguarding. Colleges within the AoC membership (England) have appointed Prevent co-ordinators whose responsibility it is to undertake to develop and deliver Prevent training to colleagues at all levels across the organisation - from governors to senior leadership teams, from academic staff to support staff. This duty sits within a college's safeguarding responsibilities and links closely with equality and diversity. Many colleges are tying all these areas in together when addressing the Prevent duty. These are all issues that our partners in the Netherlands and Sweden face. With large, ethnically diverse student populations, our partners share many of the challenges of those in the UK, but they also face particular issues such as forced marriages in the Netherlands and defection to Syria in Sweden within the locality of one of the partner colleges. The objectives of this project are to organise two group study visits (one to each country) to enable those tasked with this area of focus within their work to learn about the challenges faced in partner countries, share experience and expertise and identify new approaches to this very important and mandatory area of work. 30 participants will be drawn from AoC member colleges and the AoC staff team. Member college participants will all have a responsibility for safeguarding and Prevent and AoC staff team members will all be working within a policy setting around safeguarding and Prevent to ensure maximum benefit both individually and at a wider level.The main activities will be the two study visit programmes in either Sweden or the Netherlands. Each study visit will include a national overview of the VET system in each country and of the specific challenges around safeguarding, preventing radicalisation and equality and diversity, visits to hosting partner colleges to meet and talk to staff engaged in this area of work, gain an understanding of the local community environment where colleges are based, finishing with a one day joint peer learning conference with best practice case study presenters from both sides and round table discussions.In terms of intended outcomes we envisage that these will be the opportunity to:*Share and gain knowledge around equality & diversity, preventing extremism/radicalisation and other issues and challenges around certain minority ethnic groups of students e.g. forced marriage, genital mutilation. *Learn new approaches to working with ethnically diverse learner groups and communities.*Spend time away from the workplace with other UK participants who have a similar remit allowing for reflection on practice, the chance for group discussion on national strategy and a group approach to discussions with EU partners.*Visit Dutch or Swedish colleges, understand the context in which they are working and the learning environment.*Hear other countries' national strategies/directives around safeguarding and preventing radicalisation through briefings from government departments and/or national experts.*Engage in a peer learning day with Dutch or Swedish staff who are implementing strategies within their colleges to meet the challenges that they face.*Forge professional partnerships for continued dialogue around this area of work.*Find potential partners for further European level partnership projects.Potential longer term benefits include:*Cultural understanding of another EU country & promoting EU experience benefits to other staff & learners as a means to increasing skills and knowledge and potential future EU project partnerships;*The embedding of EU examples of best practice into Prevent and Safeguarding training for staff across colleges and into Equality & Diversity sessions to learners;*Learning will hopefully feed into individual college's Prevent strategies which are part of a college's internal quality assurance process and are directly inspected through the OfSTED inspection framework;*Learning outcomes from the project will be shared in particular with DBIS, the Home Office and the Education & Training Foundation (who are working with AoC around the provision of Prevent related training for colleges) and will hopefully inform future national strategies and identify future training needs around this area of work.
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