Some learners and volunteers have been telling us that they would like more opportunities to gain accreditation with Lead. In 2018 Lead Scotland will become an SQA Centre which allow us to meet this demand.
We won’t have our own physical centre, but we will be able to flexibly deliver accredited learning to individual learners within their own homes and deliver to small groups within accessible community venues. In our experience once people get a taste for learning, they keep going, start volunteering and work and get more involved within communities.
Our committed volunteers are on hand to enhance the learning experience by supporting learners if one to one support is needed and 25% of our volunteers are disabled people. We are still experiencing demand for our ICT home loan scheme too, not everyone has their own device.
We’ll start small initially delivering our Community Action and Leadership Award (CALA) and then as more of our staff become assessors and more learners tell us what they want to study we will build our capability to offer more courses. We are immensely grateful to ARC Scotland, who have been accrediting CALA since 2013, and it is under their guidance we have been developing our knowledge in readiness to become a centre in our own right.
We will continue to deliver the Adult Achievement Award, on licence from Newbattle Abbey College which has been a really popular course and Thinking Digitally which is a module we deliver, credit rated by Edinburgh Napier University.
Many learners still want to take up non formal learning opportunities which will enable them to move forward in life and that won’t change.
Since 1979 Lead Scotland has supported tens of thousands of disabled people, and more recently carers, to access learning opportunities which have led to more positive futures for individuals, families and communities. Onwards!