Community trusts and foundations shared the best ways of engaging trainees, apprentices and other young learners at a successful best practice day run by the Professional Footballers’ Association.

Community engagement workers based in football grounds around the country pooled their ideas and shared their experiences of supporting learning at the latest Best Practice Day organised by the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) learning project last autumn.

Co-hosted by the PFA’s Union Learning Fund (ULF) project and QPR in the Community Trust, the event mixed presentations and networking to help staff at community trusts and foundations develop new and better ways of engaging the wide variety of learners they support.

It was held in the west London club’s ground, re-named the Kiyan Prince Foundation Stadium at the start of the current season. QPR made the change to help promote the local charity named after the former youth team player who died trying to break up a knife fight outside his school in 2006.

Participants travelled from across the country to take part, coming from Barnsley, Brighton, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Reading, Southend, Swindon and Watford, as well as London clubs including Brentford, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Millwall, West Ham United.

PFA Education Adviser, Riz Rehman, who has organised all four of the learning project’s best practice days said: “With all the trusts and foundations facing similar challenges, especially around funding, this was a very positive day, and everyone left with something to take away to improve their own programmes at their respective clubs.”

In his presentation, unionlearn Communications Officer Yusuf Dadabhoy took participants through the unionlearn resources that some community trusts and foundations are already using and others could take up or expand, including the SkillCheck initial assessment tool and the Apprenticeship Essentials app.

He also discussed the benefits of Career Kickstart reviews. Looking at post-learning pathways, Bethan Norfor, People and Culture at London Ambulance Service NHS Trust, detailed the employment opportunities available to young people who have progressed through the community trusts and foundations.

For Sarah McAdam, the further education manager at Brightonbased Albion in the Community, it was particularly useful to hear more about SkillCheck.

Sarah said:

We do use SkillCheck already but maybe not to the breadth and depth that we could, so hearing how the app can be used across our apprenticeships and full-time delivery – that will only further enhance what we’re delivering to our learners.”

Sarah, who has attended all four best-practice days over the past four years, says there is nothing quite like the event.

Sarah added:

This is the only one where it’s just the PFA learning centres, which is really good because you know we’re all in the same boat and all delivering similar courses, so that’s really beneficial.”

PFA union learning rep Richard Witt, who is Reading FC’s Community Trust social inclusion manager, says he always leaves the best practice days knowing more than when he arrived.

Richard said:

There are always things you can learn, so if another club is doing something better than what we’re doing, I’m always interested in figuring out how we can make it work where we are.”

Richard organises fun educational activities every week for hundreds of children and young people, many of whom have been excluded from school, struggle with mental health issues or live with autism spectrum disorders.

He won the 2019 Inspiration Award at last year’s Pride of Reading Awards for his work at the trust. The trust’s traineeship and other post-16 programmes have very impressive progression rates.

Richard said:

The majority who come through the programmes end up going on to employment elsewhere or end up working for us.”

In the social inclusion department, we haven’t employed anybody from outside one of our programmes in more than five years and all of our junior mentors and coaches are all from one of our programmes.”

One of the first-time visitors to the day was Otis Roberts, chief executive officer of the Jason Roberts Foundation, the player foundation that has been delivering opportunities for young people in the UK and Grenada since it launched it in 2007.

Otis, a former player himself who also worked at what is now the Fulham Football Club Foundation, took away lots of ideas from the day.

Otis said:

To have people coming from far and wide, that was the best thing – it gives you an insight into what a lot of people are doing and you can take a look at what is being developed.”

For us, as a player foundation, it’s about taking the learning about what people are doing in the clubs and adapting it for a smaller organisation like ourselves.I’ll be bringing one or two of my colleagues to the next best practice day!”

QPR’s deep roots in its local community, evidenced for all to see in its response to the 2017 tragedy at Grenfell Tower, made it a natural choice to co-host this year’s best practice day.

The club’s director of football Les Ferdinand and Andy Evans, the chief executive of the Community Trust, both threw themselves into the relief efforts within hours of the fire breaking out. (Les moved onto the Lancaster West estate as a child, while Andy grew up only a few streets away.)

The trust delivered clothing and water to the tower while firefighters were still battling with the blaze; the club opened up the stadium as a relief centre; and Andy spent a week working with around 70 volunteers sorting through the food and clothing donations arriving at the ground.

The trust went on to organise a free summer programme for children from the Tower whose families were in temporary housing locally and helped organise the Game4Grenfell, which raised £1m for the survivors.

It continues to provide a key worker based by the Tower to work with young people in the area. For Andy, who welcomed participants to the best practice day, the trusts and foundations all share the same community-focused collaborative values exemplified by the QPR response to the fire.

Andy said:

In football, we’re all in competition for fans, for points on the pitch, for the best players in academies. But when the football clubs’ community organisations come together, there’s a real sense of collaboration and supporting each other and sharing best practice.”

This story first appeared in the Spring 2020 Learning Rep e-Magazine – download your copy free today.