How to move your post-16 tutorials and traineeships online ready for 2020/21

With so much uncertainty and disruption to classrooms, it has been difficult to deliver key post-16 tutorials in recent months 

For many colleges, sixth forms and training providers, it’s been tricky to adapt.

Thousands of teachers had to quickly find alternative ways to deliver online lessons, whilst still trying to provide a semblance of routine for students and a support system for parents. There have been headaches over exam cancellations, battles to keep students engaged, and questions over the value of teaching new content or simply revising prior learning during lockdown.

These challenges have also, naturally, extended to delivering our key tutorials for personal development, social awareness, and employability skills.

This non-qualification based learning, which is key to delivering your planned post-16 tutorials for Employability, Enrichment, and Pastoral (EEP) hours, and is crucial to underpinning your traineeships, has been very hard to achieve in recent months!

Having relied on face-to-face tutorial sessions, it has been difficult to engage remote students in areas like career development, CV presentation, employability skills, self-development, mental health, and safeguarding.

But keeping on top of this learning is crucial for Study Programme students and traineeship learners.

Embedding online content into post-16 tutorials and traineeships

With so much disruption, sixth forms and colleges are now using this time to plan and look for online approaches to help deliver their employability and enrichment tutorials for 2020/21.

Embedding online learning material into your post-16 tutorials can really help you to:

• Navigate any issues you may be currently facing to achieve these learning hours
• Deliver a more blended approach to these classroom tutorials in the new academic year
• Allow students to complete learning online between their other sessions (great for traineeships).

The Skills Network (TSN) can support you to deliver online content for your post-16 tutorials or traineeships.

The brand new online ‘Essentials’ study programme from TSN comprises 30 hours of online learning material for post-16 students, covering:

• Social awareness
• Employability skills
• Career development
• Safeguarding and Prevent
• Mental health and well-being
• Study skills and self-development.

This content helps to develop your learners’ employability and development for their career and life and is mapped to the latest Ofsted framework.

How can colleges or sixth forms benefit from ‘Essentials’?

The new online Essentials programme can help you in a number of ways as you finalise your curriculum plan ahead for 2020/21:

• Catch up with any learning missed during lockdown – Contact time and class sizes are likely to be limited when restrictions ease. ‘Essentials’ can be a really effective way to build-in your employability and development hours, and catch-up with key learning online.
• Flexible online content for distance delivery – Essentials is trackable, self-paced and auto-marked, allowing students to complete key learning in between sessions or deliver online tutorials to them remotely (ideal for traineeship students).
• Better engage your students – The content is delivered in a variety of ways such as videos, interactive templates and quizzes to also help you keep engagement high and improve student experience in this area.
• Manage teaching time more effectively – Teachers’ time is stretched already, this approach allows them to save time with lesson plans and resource prep. Plus, topics like safeguarding and online safety continually updated. Essentials gives both teaching staff and students access to up-to-date online learning content and templates.
• Save thousands of pounds in education costs – With 30 hours of online tutorial content for students, teachers’ time can be spent focusing on ‘stretching’ student knowledge on tutorial topics (i.e. interview preparation). You can then recover these hours and better manage overheads regarding your teaching time and timetabling.