No Disability
Project Meeting
Project Description
This project will recruit people (15) with a disability to a “fast-track” Higher National Certificate course and support them through the use of appropriate technology and personal development staff. The programme will use a blended learning approach designed to be tailored to individual need.
Our awareness of the problems individuals experience beyond the straightforward impact of the disability itself has affected the design of the proposal and the way in which support will be offered to individual participants. On the one hand we will support beneficiaries at a personal level through specialist support workers and on the other we will use technology and programme design to support individual learning styles and preferences.
Design and Deliver
The range of characteristics that we expect to be displayed by our beneficiaries demands that we design the programme in such a way as to provide a level of flexibility to respond to individual needs and preferences.
The training will be arranged in locations which are fully accessible for people with disabilities and we will ensure access to enabling IT/ICT technology to compensate for any particular visual and hearing deficit. As far as is possible training it will be arranged at a time designed to be "family friendly" so that responsibilities of individuals in relation to family care can be easily managed. We have identified also that materials utilised must be appropriate in language, level and layout to individuals drawn from a variety of cultures/sub cultures.
The training will be delivered in small freestanding units (no longer than 2 to 3 hrs at a time) with support materials available to participants in the form of hard copy materials and/or accessed via IT/ICT. This allows us both the facility to respond to constraints but also to be pro-active in delivering training that responds to individual preferences.
This project proposal is based on the experience of Blackpool and the Fylde College and Blackburn College in delivering the HNC in Management.
Recruitment of people with a disability to this programme was actively encouraged but success rates/completion rates for the target group were below benchmark standards for the course as a whole. The colleges did not wish to discontinue this active policy of encouragement but did identify a need to review provision and identify how the support the group needed could be provided. In 2005 a review was conducted including interviews with both students who successfully completed and those who dropped out. This proposal is a response to those findings.
Broadly the outcome of the research was that although the academic programmes were of suitable level conventional provision was lacking in two regards
a) It did not take into consideration adequately in its design the difficulties that individuals faced because of the backgrounds and learning/ employment experiences - to respond to this we have built in on-going support in addressing those issues through a support worker
b) It was insufficiently flexible in structure to accommodate the patterns of attendance/absence forced on some individuals because of the nature of their disability - individual experienced crises in their health that made attendance impossible, had to attend hospital appointments and so on. To address this we will develop the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) provision to offer the flexibility required.
If you would like to see a fuller version of the project please click on the link below:
