March Newsletter
Chairman"s Notes:Vital Statistics for March
March was a busy month for us. We carried out 22 assessments and 180 lessons, making a total of 202.
20 students graduated in March and congratulations are in order for:
Raymond S, Jennifer E, Laura H, Jeanette M, Amal D, Kirsty M, Joyce W, Chandra M, Mary H, Kathleen B, Patience O, Mary W, Conrad T, Alwan A, Jonathan W, Elsa J, Suki R, Pavel L, Peter L, Mandy C.
Tuesday 12th
Ola Badamosi who is Programme Officer for New Life for Paddington and Ituen Bassey came to visit U Can Do I.T. to go through all the books and figures relating to the SRB bid. The audit was extremely thorough. Avril was able to show the inspectors all the papers relating to the tutorials which had been carried out. They were also interested in seeing the individual reports of each tutorial and the length of time it took and the results achieved.
They also examined the terms and conditions of employment for the tutors and the students and went through the whole U Can Do I.T. system extremely thoroughly.
We are glad to report that the SRB Bid has run extremely smoothly. The whole programme has been run on time with exception with 1 student who was unable to get their computer installed until the end of March. We are very satisfied with the whole project.
Wednesday 20th
The meeting with Don McBean was very similar to the meeting with the SRB audit. Learning and Skills Council are also very effective and well-established and well run organisation and this was a monitoring visit for 20 Lambeth students is progressing satisfactorily. The current position is that we have carried 68 tutorials and we have submitted our final bill to the Council for settlement in the current financial year.
Friday 22nd
The Learning and Skills Council Seminar was an extremely well organised event. About 200 people attended from right across London and in the morning there were key note speakers including, Jacky Henderson who is Chief Executive of the London Central Council.
In the afternoon the conference was broken up into different working groups and Cliff and I had an extremely interesting and well-attended group which was primarily interested in problems facing people with disabilities. One of the main points which emerged from the conference was that almost every organisation faced difficulties in contacting prospective clients. As you know from reading this website this is a major problem as far UCDIT are concerned and occupies a great deal of time and cost a great deal of money. It was therefore somewhat of a relief to realise that we are not alone in this universe.
Don McBean was extremely helpful. He introduced us to a number of people and we had very useful conversations with for example, Caryn Bartham of Learn Direct whom we will be having further meetings in due course.
Funding
We are in high gear so far as funding is concerned. We are making applications to all 5 Greater London and Skills Council and this is occupying a great deal of our time and energy. We are extremely hopeful that this will be successful and will have something very interesting and favourable to report next month.
