As I walk into Workpays in Derby, I immediately immerse myself in an environment of supporting those hardest-to-reach learners to progress in life.
Workpays have a great story of growth. Starting in 2010 with a small team, Managing Directors Anne Wright and Alex Glasner tell me how their organisation grew over time and is now ready to focus on sustainability while maintaining its core ethos of supporting the most complex and vulnerable learners to thrive. The main focus over the years has been education for the hardest to reach and seeing everyone as an opportunity to support further.
The learners are all people who need a lot of engagement and support and have complex training needs. Most of the time, support is educational, social and cultural. The environment that learners come into at Workpays is at the heart of the community and has a familiar, homely atmosphere. The learner-provider relationship would not have worked if the learning environment was ‘too shiny’.
Our conversation with Anne, Alex and Kevin Dowson, who lead on their education and quality assurance function, focuses on staff recruitment and workforce planning. We discuss the challenges of recruiting the right people in the current climate and supporting tutors and trainers to develop. We all agree that workforce development should be user-led (with a focus on the question: what do our staff and providers need?) and we must increasingly think of a focus on green skills.
I then spend the afternoon with a small group of tutors and we embark on a conversation about group reflection and peer support and challenge. When I ask them how they develop themselves, they respond through group thinking and support. Working across many disciplines and coming from completely different backgrounds (from a schoolteacher to an actor and performer) helps them to be innovative as a group and the peer tutor support and group reflections are valued.
My discussions with learners reveal their diverse needs. Some are here to learn basic skills to support them in their daily lives, while others are focusing on new skills for employability. They all love their tutor and talk about a sense of safety. When I ask them what difference their learning makes, they all respond with a powerful phrase: ‘We enter the room feeling more safe and leave feeling more confident’.