OUR MISSION
To provide a mutually beneficial consortium structure for voluntary and community sector learning providers in Yorkshire & Humberside, in order to support and enable all member organisations to access funding, develop their capacity and achieve high standards of quality and performance in meeting the needs of learners and in tackling disadvantage and advancing equity and social inclusion.
OUR AIM
We will have a single key aim - to provide a direct bidding and fund management mechanism through a partnership structure for voluntary and community sector learning providers. This aim will be focused upon the access, and maintenance of, mainstream and other funding from key funding bodies.
OUR OBJECTIVES
In order to realise its overriding mission and central aim the consortium will have the following objectives to:
- Create a key enabling and support infrastructure that will serve members needs, enabling them to fulfill to optimum effect and efficiency the requirements of the Adult Learning Inspectorate and other funding and regulatory regimes as appropriate. This describes a Support Unit (SU) that will operate as the administrative hub of the consortium structure.
- Generate economies of scale and therefore efficiency savings in the management of bureaucracy through the creation of a centralised point for information management (synonymous with SU).
- Provide greater opportunity for a strategic overview of training and education in the voluntary and community sector in the region.
- Explore opportunities for increasing and improving the mutually beneficial co-ordination of activities between consortium members, including the possibility of mapping progression routes from one member provider to another, and creating an internal market for the exchange of skills, experience, expertise, resources and outputs.
- Employ expert and experienced staff within the SU.
- Create a structure wherein the member organisations own and control the consortium overall, including the work of SU.
- Be open potentially to any voluntary and community learning provider in Yorkshire & Humberside, providing it can meet certain essential quality and accountability thresholds - though it may be necessary to set a limit on the maximum number of members for the sake of organisational efficiency.
- Develop and safeguard standards and quality in relation to the consortium overall and to the learning provision of individual member organisations to ensure that we can meet the rigorous quality assurance requirements of the Adult Learning Inspectorate.
- Provide an essential voice for learners so that they can express their needs.
- Build the capacity of the member organisations, where appropriate, to be able to meet the quality assurance, monitoring and audit requirements.
- Lobby the relevant local, regional, national and international bodies and agencies, in relation to the perspectives, strengths, needs, issues and concerns of voluntary and community sector learning provider member organisations.
- Actively promote the work of the consortium to others locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
- Actively disseminate our work to others locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
- Develop and participate in multi-agency cross sector partnerships that can build the capacity of the consortium and its members, and contribute to tackling disadvantage and advancing equity and social inclusion.
OUR PRINCIPLES
There are several fundamental principles that underpin the formation of the consortium and its ultimate strategic management and operational objectives and activity. These principles describe as much what the consortium is not, as what it is.
Addressing disadvantage
What will bind the member organisations together is a common theme of addressing disadvantage (see mission statement and working definition of disadvantage). A shared aspiration will be for the "mainstreaming" of voluntary and community sector learning providers operating with the context of disadvantage and social exclusion.
Voluntary and community sector-driven
The consortium is concerned specifically with the needs of voluntary and community sector learning providers, though it will work co-operatively with other providers and agencies from other sectors.
Learner-focused
It is driven, through the empowerment of those voluntary and community sector learning providers, ultimately by the needs of disadvantaged learners, or by the needs of disadvantaged people more generally where what is involved is a learning process that develops skills to tackle particular aspects of disadvantage e.g. an advice centre training volunteers to give benefits advice.
Furthering organisational autonomy
The consortium is about protecting and enhancing the autonomy and independence of the different training provider members and not about subsuming that independence into a larger structure. Within this, the SU is about serving the needs of each individual member organisation, and not about being a self-serving independent structure. The consortium overall is about respecting and nurturing differences, and building the capacity of member organisations to get better at what they do, including bidding for and managing their own funds and managing their own quality improvement strategies.
Member ownership and control
The consortium will be self-managing or governing. It will therefore combine support with self-reliance. Open, transparent and accountable structures will be adopted so that members can elect representatives onto a management board for the consortium. This board will manage the operations of the SU, including the staff employed within it. In the execution of this management function the board will be able to call on SU staff to give expert specialist, technical and logistical information, advice and guidance in connection with post-16 educational and training matters, and in particular the requirements of LSC/ESF relating to quality/quality assurance and financial probity/audit.
Objectivity and impartiality
The consortium will be focused impartially upon the objective needs of all the member organisations that shall be equal in status. It will not be dominated by the particular self-interests of certain organisations or individuals.
Mechanism for funding
The consortium development is purely a mechanism - a way of organising primarily to increase the opportunities of accessing funds and being better able to manage those funds once acquired.
Inherent dynamism and responsiveness
The consortium needs to be dynamic and responsive so that new organisations can join in the future. Levels of support within the consortium structure will evolve over time, adapting to the changing needs of member organisations. Moreover, the consortium will actively encourage member organisations to establish and maintain partnerships and networks outside of the consortium so that they can develop their potential further.
On the management board there will be an independent arbiter whose role it will be to make sure that all these principles are being constantly upheld.
Definition of Disadvantage
Disadvantage can be defined broadly as the total or partial lack of access of individuals, groups or communities to the social, economic and cultural opportunities and benefits enjoyed by other individuals, groups or communities. Tackling disadvantage therefore connects with the aspiration for equity and social inclusion.