We were thinking about our Christmas plans already in our Partnership offices and realised we hadn’t made contact over a busy summer with our favourite charity, JDRF and their great fund-raising team.
So to make amends we are broadcasting the ideal place for you to buy your 2016 Christmas cards and do a little good too. Buy early to avoid disappointment!
Give a life-changing Christmas card this forthcoming festive season.
It’s that time of year again. We are packing our notebooks, pencils and cameras for a series of editorial visits, as usual, to the Chelmsford Ideas Festival 2016.
22nd October till the 12th November 2016.
”The Chelmsford Ideas Festival aims to stimulate and inspire people through a set of innovative events, talks and workshops”.
With a much improved web site this year, you can find a range of activities and interests to stimulate the intellect across a variety of themes. Each category of event has its own diary section. See below for what might interest you most.
To book individual workshops and events simply open the calendar entry on the web page to get full details of the event and how to book.
Highlights from the programme? We liked…
Rooted Art – Public Art Workshops 25th October, 2016 10.00 to 12.00
‘Let’s make history! Join Artist Nick Haydon (known for his large scale printmaking) and Artist Victoria Button in creating a massive historic mural in Chelmsford city centre, depicting stories of the city’s heritage. Funded by Essex County Council’.
Chat About the Old Days – 27th October and 27th November, 2016 – 14.00 to 16.30
‘Come along to this free session – enjoy a cup of tea/coffee and a cake for just £1 and join us in reminiscing about the ‘old days’. (Don’t forget: even teenagers have an ‘old days’ – what do you remember about times past?)
Our idea is to have a jolly good nostalgic chat session over a cup of tea and then for some of the memories and stories that come out to form the basis of a new community artwork to be displayed at the Ideas Hub. Maybe it will be the start of a series of artworks…who knows?’
ESA’S COPERNICUS PROGRAMME: How is E2V protecting Planet earth? 24th October 19:00 – 21:00
‘Paul Jerram is Chief Engineer for Space Imaging at e2v, Chelmsford. Headquartered in Chelmsford, e2v is bringing life to technology and employs 1750 people globally. e2v partners with customers to provide world-class image sensors and detection subsystems that can help solve the mysteries of the Universe, understand climate change on Earth and much, much more…’
Event follows the Festival launch at Anglia Ruskin University.
The Ideas Festival Chelmsford, 22nd October till the 12th November 2016, is certainly now a premier intellectual and cultural landmark in the regional festival landscape. Visit the web site and book to join in the work. You will not be disappointed.
Can you help create business builders for the next generation?
Linking Education and Business – A New Approach
Continuing our thematic coverage of new ways to support young people and the education and training sector, we were very pleased to see the emerging detail of the Enterprise Adviser Network for schools in Norfolk and Suffolk. Members of the business community volunteering some time to support schools in developing their enterprise agenda.
Contact the project in our region here: CareersEnterpriseCompany@suffolk.gov.uk
A new national programme is taking shape across Norfolk and Suffolk that aims to adopt an innovative approach to bringing business and education closer together. The New Anglia Enterprise Adviser Network aims to connects local high profile business leaders with senior leaders in local secondary schools, academies, colleges in order to helping to motivate and inspire young peoples’ career aspirations, to make a major impact on their work prospects.
Enterprise Advisers will be volunteer leaders from the Suffolk and Norfolk business community. Their role will be to provide strategic consultancy and advice to schools and colleges to improve employer engagement and careers guidance provision and thereby help bridge the gap between education and business, raise young peoples’ aspirations and enhance enterprise and employability skills.
Suffolk County Councillor Gordon Jones, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services, Education and Skills said: “We do need to increase the interaction between the education and the business community, making sure Suffolk school children have the skill set required to find work and prove themselves valuable assets to commercial companies”.
Mark Pendlington, chairman of New Anglia LEP, commented: “If we want to compete and win on a world stage we need to deliver a higher skilled workforce for our growing economy and for the all the thousands of outstanding companies, innovators and entrepreneurs that are already based here and for the many more we want to attract. We can help do that by placing business leaders at the heart of the education system, to inspire young minds when they are seeking out their future paths and looking to match their talents and aspirations with a high value and rewarding career.”
The New Anglia Enterprise Adviser Network is supported by five Enterprise Coordinators who will provide business leaders, schools and colleges with a professional service which includes high quality training, matching Enterprise Advisers to schools and colleges and extensive, ongoing support.
The project is looking for enthusiastic business people across Norfolk and Suffolk to work with schools to help our young people understand the connection between their education and the world of work.
If you have the motivation and dedication to help young people find out more about the opportunities for their future career please get in touch…
CareersEnterpriseCompany@suffolk.gov.uk
Content for this article courtesy of Suffolk County Council.
We were delighted to hear that JDRF, our favourite Eastern Region charity here at the conversationsEAST offices, have been chosen as one of the Cambridge News Cash for the Community featured participants.
Cambridge News are providing their readers with the opportunity to clip coupons from the paper, starting with twenty four coupons on Monday, which readers can then use to vote for their favourite regional charitable good cause.
For more details of why JRDF deserves your support you can visit their main web pages here. The research that JRDF funds provides life changing opportunities for children and young people.
We think there is a new energy abroad in education and training, sweeping the landscape to create new opportunities and outcome for a range of young people. Discover a couple of examples of this new delivery below…the horizon may have just go a bit nearer for young people who don’t seem to quite ‘fit the traditional bill’.
Swarm can offer young people Level 2, 3 and 4 apprenticeship framework options, with the added zest of ‘…innovative enterprise training workshops which develop the mindset and commercial awareness of apprentices’.
See more…
You can discover a comprehensive list of the integrated Swarm developmental workshops here. This impressive cast list is designed to sensitise and energise apprentices into an entrepreneurial, developmental and goals achieving mindset.
The Swarm team’s key focus qualification is the Level 3 Diploma in Enterprising Skills in a Business Environment, although the company does offer other opportunities too.
What we liked most is how this entrepreneurial flavour and admixture is seamlessly blended into the training programme for the individual, combining both the needs of the apprentice to perform well to his or her employer’s satisfaction, whilst at the same time creating the building blocks for a mind-changing mentality about what it is possible to achieve.
You can see how the next generation of mainstream Oxbridge business and political leaders are seeking to develop a social good from their careers, for example, in the 80,000 Hours programme. This Ashton led initiative caters for bright young people, we think, who may have fallen through the educational cracks or who are seeking a very practical, resource driven approach to learning and skills uptake to the benefit of business, society and the individual.
We highly commend the Swarm Apprenticeship approach to our readers. See more here.
This new, innovative scheme seeks to engage schools and suitably qualified businesses in a new form of partnership, where the school benefits from the insights and experience of the employer in a ‘… network to create powerful, lasting connections between local businesses and the schools and colleges in an area‘.
It is an idea designed to see businesses helping school senior management teams to develop strategies which link the world of work to the curriculum and energetic adaptability of schools, maximising their local contacts and accelerating the context of their educational outcomes to the benefit of both pupils and employers.
Lord Young has described the Adviser role in this way…
“I propose that Enterprise Advisers would advise head teachers and teachers on the ways employers can engage with the school, drawing on advice from key local partners, including those that offer careers advice. I would envisage that the Advisers are drawn from all sectors of the economy and not only restricted to entrepreneurs‘.
Similarly, we know that Fellows, like Robert Ashton and others are actively working with schools in the East of England too.
What we would argue for is a synergetic relationship between all these programmes of work, where employer recruitment, in the Ashton/Swarm model is also part of the options for employers in the Enterprise Adviser network, for example.
The one is not designed to swamp the other, but to add a richer texture to the offer of all. RSA Fellows can also add a powerful contribution to the development of the Enterprise Adviser network too, we are sure.
In simple marketing and recruitment terms, if I’m building a trusted network or list of individuals dedicated to social good, then lets share some of that trust and fellowship with others in the public sector, striving for the same aim.
Here at conversationsEAST we are delighted to be able to donate web hosting, design and content creation services and new media support to this new, nascent movement.
Inequality in Education – turning the tide (IETT) is about change in the educational landscape and improving equality of opportunity and outcome for children and young people across England.
You can follow IETT news on Twitter too: @Tide_Turning
The web site features not only regular news and featured ideas on the pages of The Tide, the IETT web journal, but also regular newsfeeds from a variety of sources across the education landscape.
Monographia is a growing web resource of research papers and conference contributions that mark key themes for IETT groups. The Debate – filmed is a growing archive of videos that go to the nascent movement’s campaigning and research aims.
If you have an interest in educational reform, or the social inequality agenda, we commend this site to you…Ed.
Developing your project web presence?
The conversationsEAST team are keen to offer web support to socially focused web projects in the East of England.
We are particularly happy to support projects led by RSA Fellows, as our donating Partners at SmithMartin LLP, are keen supporters of the Society. We would also like to support the planned development of IETT groups in Nottingham and Oxford.
The Chair of Changing Chelmsford Malcolm Noble and Ideas Festival Director Leonie Ramondt , and their teams, have put together a well designed and informative Festival programme – with the creative input of the Anglia Ruskin University Design Collective. (Thanks go to Jeff Bray, Becky Lockwood and Daniel Tubl).
Robotics…. Be part of world level engineering breakthroughs, achievements, and products being designed and developed in Chelmsford and Essex. You will have the opportunity to take control and get involved in various activities such as engineering design, 3D printing, using advanced computer models, robotics, aerodynamics, medical engineering, Raspberry Pi and many more. Learn about the change and impact that engineering in Chelmsford and Essex makes nationally and internationally.
Extra Information: Booking required: www.anglia.ac.uk/ community or call 01245684723
Essex Police is 175 years old this year. Nick Alston CBE was elected as the first Police and Crime Commissioner for Essex in 2012. He is currently Chair of the Board of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and Chair of the Police ICT Company Board. He will give us an overview of his experience as Commissioner, reflect on policing in Essex and provide some pointers on the police service of the future.
A strong theme of the Festival this year is the notion of Creating the City of the Future. Ideas for city change, walks through the concept of change in Chelmsford and harnessing the power to create – a three part, multi-location event.
Matthew Taylor of the RSA will be exploring the Power to Create the City, harnessing the thematic concepts enagaged in the Society’sChange Aims.
Enlightened City Making
Host: The Royal Society of Arts Venue: Chelmsford Cathedral Date: 21st October, 2015 – 10.00am to 2.30pm
Session One – ENLIGHTENED CITY MAKING
Creativity is at the heart of innovation, enterprise and good places to live. But we are increasingly expected to be resourceful and self-reliant to shape our communities, with the help of amazing digital tools. The RSA says everyone has the power to create and to stival play a role in enlightened, active communities. Using the RSA ‘Change Aims’ we will look at the power to create the city with Matthew Taylor, head of the RSA.
Extra Information: Booking required. Please book online or ring 07421061054
The conversationsEAST team will be at this event, mapping and reporting on this key Festival conceptual driver. Watch our web pages for a full report…Ed.
At the event will hear about the new glycaemic targets from Matt Williams, and the role of the research nurse from Criona O’brien, diabetes research nurse at the University of Cambridge. So why not come along and join us.
“Inequality in Education: The Future of Education in England – Organised by RSA London Inequality in Education Network hosted by Annette Smith, Education Consultant and member of Turning The Tide.
We are delighted to announce two great speakers: Diane Reay, Professor of Education at Cambridge University & Danny Dorling, Professor University of Oxford. Both speakers are passionate and informed critics of the current education system“.
The booking page on Eventbrite offers you full details of this interesting and informative event. On the booking page you can see the key questions that are to be addressed by Diane Reay and Danny Dorling, with an opportunity for you to tender your ideas and comments on the questions ahead of the event.
‘We are doing this because we think it unlikely that any significant changes will be made unless there is a strong social movement supporting progressive reform and we intend the meeting to be a contribution to the building of such a movement’.
You can also review our last conversationsEAST article on Inequality in Education, about the previous group event. See more here.
Here both Pasi Sahlberg and Peter Mortimer gave relevant and commensurately challenging speeches about our emerging movement and ‘the state of the education nation’ in England.
This is a stunning piece of work, encapsulating business modelling, ideas curation and potentiality for delivery , route mapping and success measurement – all through the meta-filter of the arts and culture agenda.
The toolkit is not a complex piece, nor is it exhaustive, but it does contain processes which any arts focused project can use to identify new opportunities, to plan the business case for the digital work, focus on audience and user value, collaborate, design, build and engage, then evaluate and share.
Simple and effective solutions to arts project planning and delivery in the digital domain.
‘The arts sector is fizzing with ideas and creative ambition. Large and small organisations are using digital technologies to deliver dazzling online experiences linked to live events, useful services for learners, interactive displays in physical spaces and so much more’. Source: The Concept – Digital Toolkit
Whether developing the concept in mind with the Six Hats methodology or taking a more mainstream approach to idea development by using the Business Model Canvas, then the toolkit from The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts offers plenty of opportunity to use the techniques best suited to your management team, volunteers or funders.
Using it here, in the arts and culture context, the main headings have been adjusted to include clarity of thought in the project overview, sales and marketing, operations and resources, staff and management…and finance too.
Contemplating a digital arts or cultural project then the web lends itself to testing, data collection, evaluation and storytelling derived from a completed project. The digital toolkit contains much that is useful in using and shaping output from new media and new technology, within the context of arts delivery.
We recently wrote, on our Communications EAST Toolkit page about The Growthverse, a very useful web service that can help you decide upon and plan deployment of your new media, user relationships and feedback methodologies. We commend it to arts professionals too. Although it is intended for tech start-ups, there is insight to be gained from exploring it, we would argue.
BUY YOUR JDRF CHRISTMAS CARDS OR ‘VIRTUAL GIFTS’ HERE.
Contact the project in our region here: CareersEnterpriseCompany@suffolk.gov.uk
