Swansea

Objectives

To develop ways to ensure that communities in disadvantaged areas were able to use and benefit from the use of new learning technologies. The Guide was to be used in the establishment of the community partnership that would take forward proposals.

The key questions that the project set out to address were:

• will an informal community partnership sustain the development of a strategy for the use of ICT in community learning initiatives?
• how do we measure the effectiveness of community partnerships in regeneration?
• what is the potential to develop a Community Foundation model to underpin the partnership?

The themes to be addressed were:

• the desirability of a community learning partnership;
• how the learning needs of a community might be assessed; and
• the establishment and the responsiveness of the infrastructure of a learning community.

These themes were to be explored with a group of projects being set up under different initiatives in one area of Swansea. A number of the projects related to IT based learning initiatives.

Outcomes

Meetings of the projects facilitated by the Community Education Service were held in the Spring and a further workshop event in July established some key characteristics for a community based network that would act as a central focus for learning city developments in the particular area targeted. It was felt that the overall mission and strategy of the learning city initiative could be seen as an enabling framework within which each of the individual projects could make a useful contribution.

The activities of the project have very much been about the setting up of a partnership. The Community Education Service has taken the lead but others are active partnership members. An existing Professional Support Group in the target area will form the foundation for the partnership. The result of the July meeting was a shared understanding of the kind of partnership that would be effective and the characteristics of a partnership that would work for those involved.

The meeting in July also raised concerns about the structures inherent in the learning city initiative from both inside and outside the local authority. Within the authority there was a feeling that the Education Department dominated the initiative and outside there were issues about inclusiveness and representation. The interest in the initiative demonstrated is a positive sign and there are plans to address these concerns.

The Guide has been used in Swansea as a framework for setting up partnerships and provided useful ideas for dealing with the key issues involved. However there was a feeling that the Guide would have been more useful if it had been more concrete in guiding users through a series of questions. There was a need to develop local checklists, guides and tools that were appropriate for "field level" potential partners.

The project felt that the Pathfinder project had enabled progress to be made on a key area in learning city development. There had been clear gains in terms of partnership and commitment to joint working. The issue of assessment of community learning needs had not been addressed through the project as anticipated at the beginning, but the establishment of shared criteria for a community partnership and a commitment to such a partnership represented a significant move forward within the learning city initiative.