IN DEPTH
The inception of Future Ready Hubs at Education Partnership North East
Adapting services to meet future needs takes preparation and planning, especially when you have a diverse range of users with differing needs and motivations. Here Scott Marsden looks at how a north-east coalition of further education colleges moved from Learning Centres to Future Ready Hubs.
EDUCATION Partnership North East is a group of Colleges of Further Edu- cation which encompasses Sunderland College, Northumberland College and Hartlepool Sixth Form College. We are the largest and the highest performing – as recognised by Ofsted – such group in the region. Nationally we are the second for FE. We have a community of over 8,300 students and our provision ranges from traditional A Levels and GCSEs to T Levels and BA and BSc degree courses enfranchised by our partners, the Uni- versity of Cumbria and Hull University. Our subject coverage is wide from Equine at our Kirkley Hall Campus to Engineering, Hos- pitality and Catering and Travel and Tourism at our City Campus to the visual and perform- ing arts at our Bede Campus in Sunderland and Hartlepool Sixth Form College. Large and intricate as our organisation is, we have always had a tradition of strong information services provision – and this has been given a further boost with the evolution of our Learning Cen- tres into state-of-the art ‘Future Ready Hubs’.
A reflective mindset
Although Learning Centre staff stoically kept information skills training going during the Covid pandemic and we took the opportunity to add to our e-books and e-journals data-
36 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Scott Marsden, Learning Centre Co-ordinator Learning Innovation, Sunderland College.
base collections to help students remotely, something changed after we came fully out of Lockdown. Student learning had seemingly undergone a paradigm shift as a result of academic staff taking a leap-of-faith with Teams and online delivery moving to centre stage. As society was revived from the crisis, our libraries never really returned to their previous state of business – with declining physical usage – and staff realised that we needed something more to enhance student learning.
There was an initiative by the Senior Leader- ship and Management Team across the college group to move us from the transactional to the digital, and provide students with something beyond the learning opportunities they could
April-May 2024
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