Local skills work in Nottinghamshire

Nottinghamshire Skills Hub Pilot

Purpose:

The purpose of local skills hubs is to ensure Sport and Physical Activity is a priority within Local Skills Improvement Plans in hyper local areas, and to ensure employer training and skills need is met by local provision.

How?

In Nottinghamshire, we have engaged an array of employers from large national leisure sites, to sole traders, coaching companies and healthcare. We have worked with these organisations to assess their training and skills gaps within their current workforce and what they believe they need from a future workforce through the use of a skills diagnostic tool.

Alongside this we are:

• Working with local education provision and further education (in particular Vision West Nottinghamshire College) to review their S&PA provision for students inline with local employer need.
  • We have done this in the form of a new study programme – ‘CIMSPA Professional qualification’ which has employer need at the centre of a modular approach where learners graduate with qualifications (such as L2 Gym Instructor, Lifeguard, Sports Coaching, First Aid/health and safety and more) enabling them to be deployed straight into the local workforce. This will change year upon year dependant on employer need.
• Feeding into local organisations to create funded training opportunities for employers through colleges.
• Acting as a conduit between employers and education provision, to link the two more closely in quality work placements and training opportunities.

Outcomes so far

College outcomes:

Year 2 – 10 students locally deployed as lifeguards since September 2022 (photo shows qualified students at Lammas Leisure centre

Year 1 of study programme at West Notts College – 50% of students went into employment locally

Skills hub governance

As part of the local skills work, a Local Skills Accountability Board (LSAB) has been established for Nottinghamshire, this is made up of employers within the sport and physical activity sector; Active Notts; health representatives; West Notts College, Economic development officers, Nottingham Trent University, local District Councils and D2N2 (Nottinghamshire’s Local Enterprise Partnership).

This board is chaired by Jack Garner (SERCO) and the board’s aim is to create the local skills plan for the area in sport and physical activity. We will work together to ensure the local skills strategy meets both national and local strategic objectives, aligning closely to Sport England strategy ‘Uniting the movement’. The Local Skills Strategy for Nottinghamshire is in its draft stages and together with the board we have began to look at how we can collaboratively action the key objectives identified from this.

Through the use of a skills diagnostic tool (see below), completed by 45 employers in Nottinghamshire, we developed an insight into the training needs locally. After the mandatory training needs including safeguarding and risk awareness, the top training needs were:

• Equality, diversity and inclusion
• Customer Engagement
• Community Engagement
• Mental health

CIMSPA skills diagnostic survey explained

• A skills diagnostic is a short survey conducted by a skills hub manager with the aim of capturing workforce data from around your county to create a true picture of the upcoming recruitment challenges (the skills diagnostic is not an assessment, rating or inspection process).
• Your local skills hub manager will carry out the skills diagnostic survey with sport and physical activity employers across the county.
• The survey audits the current skills within your workforce and identify gaps that need to be filled based upon the demand in your area, using the knowledge and skills criteria of each CIMSPA professional standard.
• The skills diagnostic data will help inform decisions made by your county’s sport and physical activity local skills accountability board, who will be putting forward the case for what provision is needed in your area.

Through this data we were also able to assess the recruitment need in the area:

Survey results individuals needed in the next 12 months, by job role

Putting the data to work in colleges

The recruitment need estimate for these employers alone is around 500 people across various roles – demonstrating the need to ensure our future workforce have the relevant training and development opportunities to meet this demand.

This employer data is frequently fed back into West Notts college (and others across the region as we expand) with the aim of developing snapshot training for employers to fulfil these training needs and upskill current staff into these roles, to provide the best experience for our local communities.

Moving forwards

The work to date has been positively received and supported by employer and local stakeholders. With these collaborations, we are able to ensure the sport & physical activity sector within Nottinghamshire is aligning closely to the Local Skills Improvement plan for D2N2 and, as sector, we are able to support the implementation of the local skills improvement plan for for the county.

Going forwards, we will continue to collate data from employers across the region, and feed this information into our local skills strategy and local education provision, to ensure the S&PA workforce in Nottinghamshire is correctly trained and fit for purpose.