Sheffield - Citinet Project

Objectives

The development and extension of an electronic network of private sector, public sector and community based learning. The project expressed an interest in all strands of the toolkit in its application for funding.

The project is built around a partnership, which is to include all the organisations, large and small that are involved with the running of the Learning Centres in Sheffield. The idea of the project is to extend access and co-ordinate learning centre activity. The Citinet project itself was not a Pathfinder activity, but the Pathfinder project was one of the tools, which Sheffield used in its evaluation of the development of the Citinet network.

Citinet has initiated a dynamic structure offering a hierarchy of learning centres, ranging from an information point to learning centres, which have a range of student support services. All centres have to comply with a required standard. The evaluation carried out was partly looking at progress to date with initiatives and partly looking at the challenges that were likely as a result of Ufi developments. The Sheffield evaluation had a number of strands itself, using the Guide 'Practice, Progress and Value', the initial Citinet prospectus and response to evaluation questionnaires sent to the Citinet Steering Group as tools in the evaluation.

Outcomes

The Guide was found to be a useful way of checking on the setting up of Citinet, its performance, progress and effectiveness. It was also found useful to see what had been achieved elsewhere and how value-added might be dealt with.

Using the partnership strand, it was clear certain desirable characteristics were present in the initiative. An agreement had been delivered and a number of key participants were involved, although it was felt that Trade Unions, Commerce and Industry and the Public Sector employers might need to be included. They were absent from the current Citinet partnership. There was an understanding that the participation strand was not well developed in the Citinet project and the performance strand in particular was not begun in the current initiative.

As a part of this three-stage initiative, it would seem from the Project report that the Guide was useful, including the recommendations of the consultant used through the Pathfinder funding. These were fed into the evaluation process and many of them have been taken on by the project.