The Project being run by Adult Services in
Chadderton Hall Park has always been a favorite of mine, the
atmosphere has always been relaxed and caring the Service Users who
attend the centre really enjoy themselves and the staff can not do
enough, this influenced us in the past to try to help out by buying
raffle prizes from the service whilst we promote their service.
Cheryl Brock who is running Chadderton Garden
Centre has a lot of vision and felt she wanted to do more to bring
the community into the centre and to help them access education at
the same time utilising the training room they have there to it’s
full potential.
Cheryl approached me to see if they could
access education courses. I said yes straight away not considering
the impact this would have on me. The easiest way I have found is
to give the learners something they cannot access for free, so I
suggested a basic ICT course, supplied by Dean Briody at the Unite
Education Dept at Salford, using computers supplied by Unite and
unite Education Organiser John Lea, with a voluntary contribution
of £2.00 for Tea & Coffee and Cake and Biscuits. This would
also help to bring revenue into the centre hoping eventually to
make it self sustainable.
The courses they had in mind were ICT,
Literacy and Numeracy, as well as informal learning such as Craft
and Languages. A meeting was arranged for us to meet up on the on
Tuesday the 6th September at the training room at Chadderton Hall
Park, from this meeting I agreed to help set up a library there
linking them to the Library Service as I had described the informal
library system we have in the Moorhey Street Unite Learning room
and she thought this would be wonderful, I also agreed to link up
Oldham Lifelong Learning to see if it would be conceivable to
establish Literacy and Numeracy classes there, this is ongoing at
this moment in time and also I agreed to source a 6 hour basic ICT
for any one who would be interested in a beginners course.
I asked Cheryl to identify a minimum of 8
Learners and as soon as she had, I would get the classes moving.
The day after Cheryl had 8 learners and I had to make good my
promise, this proved more difficult than I had imagined because the
usual funding streams would be inaccessible due to mixed Employee,
Service User and Community cohort, so I decided to deliver the
basic ICT course myself, we had the laptops available and I had
shadowed Dean Briody (Unite the Union Tutor) on many occasions
whilst he delivered basic IT here within the council 18 months
previously, Dean shared his course with me and arranged for me to
shadow a tutor delivering the course to different companies within
Greater Manchester so I had a better idea on how to deliver the
course to my audience.
The course induction went very well and it
soon turned into a 3 hour session, this was not an issue as I had
allocated 4 hours anyhow and I was struck by the enthusiasm
shown by
the learners, what was a pleasant surprise I was to find that
within the mixed bag of learners was that two learners were service
users and were possibly the most advanced in the class, so much so
that they were demonstrating to their class mates how to carry out
the first exercise and I had to make a rule that no one was allowed
to touch any one else’s computer, once the agreement was reached I
could concentrate on the other learners two of whom even though
they owned computers had never used them.
Everyone gave positive feed back, but some
forgot to make a contribution for the refreshments, we’ll get them
next week; as this model seems to be working we are working on
plans that once this class is established and self sufficient to
roll the model out to other venues with in the Borough and look at
some of the areas that could really do with a community
classroom.
Stephen Hewitt
Learning Coordinator
Unite the Union
