Teach Too

Some say collaboration is important, I’d say it is critical to our success.

Sussex comprises of two counties and an independent city authority, rolling hills and miles of beaches. The industrial heartlands around Gatwick Airport and some of our coastal towns are thriving. Yet the area is more a champion of small creative and hospitality enterprises, sole-traders and ambitious SMEs more driven by innovative products than occupying huge office complexes. In short, Sussex isn’t the UK’s big business capital, and this has pros and cons.

One of the biggest challenges is in the area of adult skills. The development, refreshment, and transfer of skills all rely on the partnership of pedagogical excellence in vocational learning. This is particularly important for cutting-edge enterprises embracing a digital future.

Our region has enormous skills gaps, and scores of employed adults with no formal learning beyond level 2. Conversely, Brighton and Hove is one of the most qualified cities in the UK, with doctoral students competing for work in coffee shops.

The biggest structural challenge is ensuring that the local vocational training offer is as relevant, cutting-edge and ambitious as the businesses driving our local economy. Our colleges, training providers and universities work hard to capture life in industry and into classroom teaching. However, the distance between workforce innovation and the experience of teachers and assessors can be quite wide.

We’re trying to change that through the Teach Too model.

For us Teach Too is a framework, some hooks to hang some coats on, as it were. It considers the business case (from both the employer’s and provider’s perspective) for more integrated, collaborative course design.

The utopia of ‘co-design’ is hard to realise. The all-too-real barriers of cost, time, commercial sensitivity and ever-changing national policy often cannot be easily overcome. Yet, with some skills gaps growing exponentially, the advent of T-Levels and a widening vocational higher education offer around the corner, we must overcome them. Without local businesses and training providers working hand-in-hand, we will continually miss the mark.

A mutual business case is imperative, as is the need to find a shared language. Terms like 'pedagogy' and even educational acronyms put off many business owners.

The same goes for providers. Businesses have their heads in ‘the cloud’ and solutions architecture. They know the difference between junior, executive and C-Suite jobs and they want their apprentices to be ‘T-shaped’. For some people who have worked in a college for many years, this is just noise.

To achieve a local vocational and work-based learning offer that responds to key business growth demands, and a sustainable Brexit-proof workforce for the future, we need to work together.

This means industry leaders getting into classrooms, suggesting engaging ways to deliver units, shaping curriculum options, explaining new equipment or software and creating a culture in which teams have the know-how to support junior staff with their learning.

It means tutors, lecturers and assessors feeling confident about emerging trends in business, using case-studies and worked examples in their teaching. It means introducing learners to attitudes and behaviours to help them progress in the workplace.

Teach Too is the best way to start this conversation, to test some approaches out together and to find that shared language.

In Sussex, we have already had a taste of Teach Too through the excellent work at Plumpton College. We will build on this to use Teach Too principles of co-design and dual professionalism to create a culture of course development and teaching confidence that makes Sussex competitive on the international stage.

Watch this space!

Richard Freeman is Lead Projects Consultant for The Sussex Council of Training Providers, one of the largest and longest-established local provider networks in the country, with a diverse membership including independent training providers, colleges, schools, universities, local authorities, awarding bodies, EdTech companies and more.