Steve Stewart Executive Director, Connexions Coventry & Warwickshire

1. Steve Stewart Executive Director, Connexions Coventry & Warwickshire Practical Aspects of E-Guidance OR Is it Worth the Hassle?

2. Content • What do we do? • Why bother with the electronic world? • Challenges • Good Practice • Coventry & Warwickshire’s next heroic phase

3. What do we do? • Information • Advice • Guidance • Support • Placement

4. Why bother with the Electronic World? • We need to work SMART: • Limited resources – need to do more with existing resources; • Capacity = work plus waste; • We need to motivate, empower and enable our most precious resource – our staff; • It enables us to give our clients what they want in the ways they want it, eg. Connexions Direct.

5. Challenges • Implementation – staff training and time, and costs of potential further refinement; • Demonstrating added value – not just doing it for effect.

6. Good Practice:Coventry & Warwickshire Experience • INFORMATION - websites encourage young people to explore and research; • ADVICE – young people like and use email communications and phone line contacts;

7. Good Practice - continued • GUIDANCE: • What would we do without Computer Aided Packages? • Great potential for on-line assessment of clients, ie. Decision Making Readiness Tool • SUPPORT: • Text messaging is a key element of support to young people and tracking; • On-line assessment of risk factors.

8. Our Next Heroic Phase Electronic Clearing House of all post-16 opportunities for Year 11 and 12 leavers for academic year 2004/05

9. What is it? Simply, it’s an electronic applications service to year 11 and 12 young people covering all opportunities for them to progress onto, ie: • Training • Apprenticeships • Further Education • Post-16 learning at school It builds on the principles and processes of the UCAS system.

10. How Does it Work? • Young people have access to the full range of information on what’s on offer at the end of Year 11 and 12 (ideally a WHICH GUIDE); • The guidance community, ie. tutors, teachers, Connexions PAs, work-based learning providers, lectures etc provide impartial advice and guidance to young people to help them to decide their career plan;

11. How Does it Work?continued • With an agreed time period, ALL year 11 and some year 12 will make their applications; • The application is centrally cleared to the learning provider listed by the applicant.

12. How Does it Work? continued • The provider makes offers to the applicants; • After exam results time, the provider and applicant confirm the placement; • Those applicants who don’t achieve any required qualifications follow a process similar to UCAS clearing.

13. What is the added-value? • To the client – one simple, user-friendly application process to a complicated education and training market; • To Connexions – we can simply track progress of all our clients.

14. What is the added value?continued • To learning providers – they receive applications to agreed timescales with the information they need to make offers; • To Local LSCs – they have hard, up-to-date, factual data on the demand for provision which shapes planning and gives time to plugging shortages / gaps in provision.