ICT IN PRACTICE AWARDS 2005 - COLLABORATION WINNER
Karen Goddard, the Nottinghamshire Education Business Alliance

By Gloria Sayer

Karen Goddard smiles when the Nottinghamshire Education Business Alliance (NEBA) is described as a "dating agency". Like developing any relationship, bringing together the worlds of education and business has never been easy. She believes that ICT has provided a key to a sustainable and mutually beneficial way for the two to work together.

Karen heard about a valuable relationship that had built up between the Valley Comprehensive School in Worksop and Butlins in Skegness. Butlins had provided 25 two-week work experience placements for Applied GCSE Leisure and Tourism students. But not all students following similar courses across Nottinghamshire could have this sort of experience. So could ICT provide virtual work experience for others?

Samantha Gemmell, managing director of Creative Media Matrix Ltd, and her team had some answers. "It is not practical for a business to have dozens of students on site every week," she says. "They can't go into certain places for health and safety reasons. Our suggestion was that a virtual tour of Butlins on CD-Rom would show far more than a real tour could ever do. The interactive follow-up materials allow the students to take real business roles and see the consequences of the business decisions they make."

Chris Baron, resort director at Butlins Skegness, agrees and sees the main benefit of this collaboration to his business being the opportunity to get the message about the sector's careers out to large numbers of young people. "The Leisure and Tourism business is one of the UK's main employment sectors," he says. "Young people need to understand the skills we are looking for and what jobs are available to them. Work experience is an impractical way of doing this for large numbers; the CD-Rom has the power to change young people's perceptions of our sector and see Butlins as a leader."

Following the success of the Butlins CD-Rom collaboration, Karen now believes that ICT allows organisations like NEBA to ask questions: for education, "What is it most difficult for you to deliver to your students?"; for business, "What is it most difficult for you to show to education about your company?" Then she can ask the media experts, "How can we do this?" Karen's crucial role, and that of her team, is to co-ordinate, liaise with all partners, fundraise, troubleshoot and, above all, "keep a sense of humour".

All the partners in this collaboration agree with Karen that each must be clear from the start about what benefits they want from the project and about what professional expertise they bring to the project. There has to be some honest talking about mutual understanding of each other's cultures.

The success of the Butlin's project has led to the production of a suite of 10 CD-Roms for working with both large and small businesses: Applied Science with Boots plc; Applied Business with Global Fine Foods and Capital One; Applied ICT with Royal Mail; Health and Social Care with Collingham Medical Centre; Manufacture with Nottingham Textile Group; Art and Design with Games Workshop; Engineering with Rolls Royce; Construction with Bowmer and Kirkland.

Brian Rossiter, Valley School's headteacher identifies the most important aspects of the development of these resources, "The content is written by teachers who have mapped the learning available in a real business environment and linked that learning to the GCSE specifications. The CD-Roms encourage independent learning at all ability levels."

Karen has seen good progress in disseminating the resource; 20 schools in Nottinghamshire are now using the CD-Roms in the county's Learning Through Work project. SEMTA, the sector skills council for science, engineering and manufacturing technologies has sponsored the Science and Manufacture CD-Roms to go to all their partner schools and the Specialist Schools Trust has provided all their subject specialists with the relevant sector resource. Karen now hopes that more schools throughout the UK will see the value of ICT to bring the world of business into the classroom.

So, as in every relationship, what are the highs and lows? For Karen the low point was learning to deal with the way in which collaboration makes every deadline hard to meet. Samantha Gemmell cautions that all partners must be "patient and resilient", while Brian Rossiter's low point was the difficulty in being able to release his teaching staff from the class room to carry out the work.

But for Karen the high points outweigh any difficulties: seeing so many students being able use ICT in an imaginative way to find out about the world of work, seeing the teams from all the partner organisations "developing something unique and exceeding any brief set for them", having excellent feedback from teachers. And finally the endorsement for the project given by the BECTA award: ICT does provide a key to open doors between the world of education and business. 


KAREN'S TOP TIPS 

• There are a number of organisations in your area who can help you to collaborate with local business eg Education Business Partnerships and Consortia. Contact them and find out if they are developing any ICT projects to support you and your students.
• Spending time in a company on a Professional Development Placement will ensure you have recent experience of business. It will also help the company understand how they can collaborate with you.
• Make sure any resources that you develop with business can be easily updated. Students need current information to understand how businesses change and grow.
• Remember when working with business to be flexible and realistic about what a company can do: they are not set up to meet exam specifications!
• A good collaborative ICT CD-Rom will not look out of place in the boardroom, will provide support for teachers and be the kind of package that young people would choose from the shelves of PC World.
  

KAREN'S TOP WEBSITES
DfES's Education Business Links 
Centre for Education and Industry 
Federation of Education Business Links Consortia 
National Education Business Partnerships Network 
Nottinghamshire Education Business Alliance


KAREN'S TOP TECHNOLOGIES
Communication technologies are essential in an undertaking of this kind. Email was important, especially when dealing with teachers, because teachers are frequently not available to respond to telephone calls.

Digital video was extremely significant as a way of recording what was important to all partners in the collaboration. Video was also important as way of transmitting that information in a form that would reach a wide range of abilities.

Gloria Sayer is a consultant in vocational learning and education business links