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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH COMMUNITIES FIRST

‘Dockleaf’ is a long-term capacity building project supporting the Llanion Community, its groups and individuals, to find their voices and use their skills and experiences to change, challenge, negotiate, persuade and jointly plan for the benefit of this community. We work closely with the 'Springboard' project; for additional information on this please click on the link.

For more information on how 'Dockleaf' has positively affected the life of children throughout the school, please click the link below.

‘Dockleaf’ provides NVQ Childcare and Teaching Assistant training within the community primary school to Llanion ward adults and looks to both achieving professional qualifications and employment opportunities.

The WAG Foundation Phase initiative looks to recruit over 2,000 trained (NVQ 3) teaching assistants into Early Years settings by 2010, in both maintained and non-maintained sectors. It has also sets goals, to be realised by 2010, for eight in ten of the adults of working age to have an NVQ 2 or equivalent qualifications and for six in ten to have NVQ 3 or equivalent qualifications.

‘Dockleaf’ provides opportunities for local adults to continue their professional development through higher education foundation degrees and teacher training opportunities. For more information please click the link below.

Poverty and disadvantage are created by a complex number of factors, including poor educational achievement, low skills base, low earnings, benefit subsistence, poor housing and environments, substance misuse, local job markets, perceptions about stigma, attitudes to support services, traditions of acceptance, attitudes to learning opportunities etc.

The relationship between poverty and low achievement is part of a wider cycle in which family disadvantage is passed on from one generation to the next. Closing the opportunity gap in education is an important part of combating long-term causes of disadvantage.

Training and education are equally and intimately related to successful community development, social inclusion, wealth creation and personal fulfilment. Our goal is to assist in the process of unlocking individuals’ capacity to acquire the confidence to be adaptable and enterprising.

The community has accepted the opportunities to re-engage with formal training and education. Seeing what their friends and neighbours have done and are doing, seeing the impact that this re-engagement has had and is having on lives within their communities, has resulted in the ‘Dockleaf’ project becoming highly successful, popular and valued.

Childcare and teaching assistant training is delivered through access by adults to childcare settings in the community school which offer the resource with which to train and the free childcare provision to ensure access to training by local adults.

From September 2007, additional training is being developed in respect of the ‘outdoor curriculum’ (a key element of the WAG Foundation Phase curriculum for under-7s in Wales). Resources are being developed both on and off-site to use with local adults in their training to ‘Forest Schools’ qualifications.

Linked into the formal training opportunities is training to focus upon workplace opportunities; this involves linking with Family Literacy and Basic Skills training and in practical workplace training in activities such as CV writing and interview skills.

Through the CF Partnership, the community school will manage the ‘Dockleaf’ project. The ‘Dockleaf’ management board will:

Website created by Bev Evans, PDCS, 2008