The 2019 options and family fun day bright together Mums, kids and local training providers to help people get the best start for September.
Adult Education, West Met Skills, JGA and Gingerbread made it a day to remember for the mums and the children enjoyed the free activities.
s
10:00 – 12:00
Botwell Green Library
Bring your children to our family fun session
Activities and free takeaways for them and refreshment and relaxation for you
Bring the kids, have some fun and get some great ideas about local courses from our partners
SPECIAL GUEST: Hillingdon Adult and Community Learning and Uxbridge College
Belina GRoW has been highly commended for Innovation the 2019 ERSA Employability Awards.
The awards were announced at a special ceremony in London this week hosted by author and entrepreneur, Lucy Clayton, with a special message delivered by the Minister for Employment, Alok Sharma MP.
The GRoW programmeis for women who want to work part-time and is delivered in primary schools, children’s centre, with events run in school hours, often with on-site creche. As part of the approach the prorgamme is committed to employing people who require flexible working to reflect and inspire the participants. G4s nominated the project for the Award,
Now in its seventh year, the ERSA Employability Awards celebrate best practice across the employment support sectorand seek to demonstrate the day-to-day hard work and dedication of those working to improve the lives of jobseekers, communities and the wider workforce.
ERSA received nearly 150 entries across ten categories demonstrating the breadth of work in the sector.
This year’s winners were selected by an all-star panel of judges, namelythe editor of The Sun’s employment page, Jane Hamilton, Phillip Blond, internationally recognised political thinker and Director of ResPublica senior Department for Work and Pensions official, Mark Staley and Winner of Adviser of the Year 2019, Tanya Weston of Genius Within.
ERSA’s Interim Chief Executive, Elizabeth Taylor, says:
‘On behalf of everyone at ERSA, I would like to say a huge congratulations to this year’s winners. We are delighted to celebrate the achievements of individuals and organisations across the employment support sector – from the frontline advisers supporting people towards employment, the jobseekers overcoming huge barriers to work and the organisations ready to give people that much needed chance. Thank you to everyone who entered this year’s awards.’
Minister for Employment, Alok Sharma, says:
“I want to thank and congratulate all of this year’s winners and runners-up, for all their fantastic work on behalf of jobseekers up and down the country.
We have more people in work than ever before, but projects like these are making sure we spread that opportunity even further and provide vital support to those looking for work.”
ENDS
From the end of October, if you live in Hillingdon and start work, you are likely to be moved on to Universal Credit. This is a single monthly payment for people in or out of work. It replaces some of the benefits and tax credits you might be getting now:
When to Apply
As soon as you are entitled to do so as it can take up to five weeks for your first payment to reach your account. The date you submit your claim is the date of the month your Universal Credit payment will be paid. This is called your assessment date.Universal Credit is paid monthly in arrears, so you’ll have to wait one calendar month from the date you submitted your application before your first UC payment is made. This is called your assessment period. You then have to wait up to seven days for the payment to reach your bank account.This means it can take up to five weeks before you get your first payment.
The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) are well known for their evidence based projects that show how behavioural insights can boost engagement, job search and resilience; so I was really excited to be asked by ERSA to respond to their work following a fascinating presentation from Rony Hacohen of the Team at ERSA’s Communications Policy and Insights Network
Belina’s programmes have always used behavioural insights as a base. The academic studies that inform our work are well known: Daniel Kahneman’s Fast and Slow thinking; Nudge Theory; Maslow‘s Hierarchy of Need, Philip Zimbardo’s work on time; Transactional Analysis; and Honey and Mumford’s learning styles. Using this research, our approach is a group programme called GRoW – Get Ready for Work – that has training techniques that challenge an individual’s current thinking and behaviour.
One insight, Value Attachment, has been used in America to support ethnic minorities to improve their test scores. The theory behind this is that people can Improve their outcomes if they have an opportunity to consider positive attributes about themselves before they undertake a task. Conversely, negative connotations have a negative influence. An example is when Asian women did a series of maths tests. In one of the sessions there was a discussion before the test of the perception that women tend to be worse at maths. In the second test there was a discussion on how Asian people were often considered to be good at maths. In the tests, which were of the same standard, the women did better in the second test; after a discussion that indicated they would be more likely to be better at maths.
We wanted to look at how we could adopt this approach for our parents. We work with women who initially feel that they have little to offer and that employers are not interested in them. We want to challenge that.
The first activity is to ask the mothers to make a list of all the things that mothers do. This list usually starts with cooking, cleaning, caring and bathing. It often then moves on to helping with homework and taking children to school before developing into transferable skills like driving, negotiating and, sometimes even, peacekeeping. The discussions in the groups become more animated and women become more confident and start to talk about the fact that they ‘do it all’ and they support the whole family and that, actually, they are “amazing”.
We then ask them in groups to come up with a poster/advert that sells mothers to employers and present it to the group. As you can see from the posters here, the women show that they feel positive and empowered and in the presentations they often explain that the employers would be “getting a bargain”. From Octomum. to SuperMum the posters and presentations are a pean to the multitasking skills mothers exude.
At the end of the whole programme, we ask them to reflect on the project – and often the break through moment for them is this session and it gives them the boost they need to start on their way back to work.
We are delighted to announce the launch of our new ‘GRow Your Own Business Programme’ which will be running for three Mondays from 11th June at the Hillingdon Women’s Centre with Mercedes Grant as our specialist Tutor.
Mercedes runs her own successful pregnancy massage business. Prior to that she attended a Belina Grow programme in Islington in 2012, with her son then aged three and soon joined Belina as our first employee. She is an expereinced GRoW trainer. The ‘Grow You Own Business’ Programme will provide practical insight into what it means to run your own business and the benefits it can bring for you and your family.
Monday 11 June 2018
Preparing your Business Plan
Monday 18 June 2018
Promoting your Business
Monday 25 June 2018
Finance – keep it simple
Every week Belina publishes a jobs bulletin containing part-time and some full time jobs that will suit women returners in Hillingdon.
Emails come directly to your phone and you can link through to the jobs and usually apply on line.
If you want to get onto the mailing list just fill in the form below
https://mailchi.mp/4a72e9ae6af6/belina-jobs-bulletin-2728337?e=b904e8b1a3
With the retirement age soon to go up to 68, The 50-year career is becoming a reality. What are the challenges we face and will they affect men and women differently?
Liz Sewell is the Director of Belina: Get Ready for Work, a programme that supports women into employment, enterprise and training across London
With Brexit, the gig economy, stagnating wages and low productivity dominating the employability headlines one of the biggest changes seems to be taking place in the background. That is the extension of all our working lives. For young people leaving school this summer they are likely to be working for a minimum of fifty years before they are entitled to their pension. For Women this is an even bigger change as they had previously been able to retire at 60.
Fifty years is a long time to look ahead and make predictions, so let’s look back. Someone starting work fifty years ago, in 1967, might have expected a career in one industry, with many expecting a job for life. Most women would have not expected to work full time for all their working lives. Families were bigger, first time mothers were younger. Going on maternity leave was more likely to mean years rather than months and a return to work would as likely be part-time. Most women’s careers were shorter, and more fragmented.
Women starting work in 2017 will be better educated, they will be older when they have their first child, likely to have fewer children in their life time. Their longer working lives should enable them to participate more in the workforce, and gain ground in terms of pay equality as child rearing takes up a smaller percentage of their working lives.
But we need to be looking at the effects of this longer career on all women. At Belina we work with women, mainly mothers and often single mothers. Our cohort is usually a long way away from work. What they want from their working life is flexibility – something that allows them to take care of their responsibilities as parents as well as earning money. For many professionals that is just what IT has done – allowed them to mold their work around their lives. But for people in low-wage jobs, where they need to be present, like retail, care or cleaning, IT has not delivered them flexibility. These are not jobs that can be done over the internet. We know it is these women who account for many of the families where someone is working, but they are still living in poverty.
Work offers independence, increases confidence and provides an opportunity to maintain a lifestyle of choice. We do, however, need to ensure that the right type of work is available. we need to challenge the gig economy and encourage organisations to look at what society needs and not allow it to be structured solely for the benefit of the new disrupter organisations like Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon – great as they are at creating new ways of working.
Making jobs that appeal and work well for men and women caring for their children should be a priority in the millennium age. It is all of society’s responsibility to nurture and grow our young people into happy, creative and responsible adults if we want our society to thrive. It is in everybody’s interests to create an environment for people to be able to combine family and caring roles with work that helps them thrive as a unit.
But for many families it is not just childcare that is going to take up their time, care for the elderly is becoming a growing part of family life.
It’s clear that now we’re living in the era of the 50-year career that we should all be doing more to make work “work” for men and women, but it is also true that whilst women continue to take the main responsibility for caring, specialist support and specialist knowledge of women, mothers, lone parents and elder-carers remains crucial.
