Equal-Works

Background

Northwest Vision and Media is the media industry's provider of one-stop training solutions for the North West region. Its mission is to ensure that the industry in the North West has a highly skilled workforce to lead it into a 21st century multimedia landscape. It offers a whole range of flexible training solutions for media companies, employees and freelances in the north west of England. Its aim is to identify, nurture and support creative talent and ensure that people have the skills they need in the market, and that the industry is well served by a diversity of talent. Northwest Vision and Media is an integral part the media industry.

The board of directors consists of senior representatives from the broadcasters, trade associations and unions in the North West region - the BBC, Granada TV, EMAP Performance, Cosgrove Hall Films, Warthog, BECTU and PACT. Key Northwest Vision and Media staff have worked in the industry for many years. The company is in a key position to deliver a broad range of solutions in answer to the need to open up the market to a diverse workforce, and redress the current underrepresentation in the cultural and creative industries (CCI).

Aim

To deliver the North West regional programme of training activities and be involved in Creative Apprenticeship collaboration. The programme comprises a wide variety of activities that are designed to implement sustainable mechanisms to help target groups who find it difficult to access work in the CCI sector.

Objectives

The objectives have been to pilot a wide variety of specific measures, which include:

• initiating positive action to address BME underrepresentation
• establishing industry training placements
• exploring alternative access to digital content markets: high level games
• developing bespoke employability workshops
• developing scriptwriter and director skills of BME producer/directors
• developing staff via mentoring and trainee shadowing
• developing vocational and accredited training in a regional context
• developing the regional agenda to promote cultural diversity
• establishing a new vocational framework with core modules
• developing business assistance for media creatives
• establishing a media practitioner network
• establishing a regional media training provider network.

Target groups

BME, women, disabled people, white working class.

Northwest Vision and Media have supported 280 individuals, of whom 51% were non-white British, 13% were disabled and 39% were unemployed at time of enrolment

The regional training provider network assisted participating organisations to share methods of best practice and improve existing procedures and techniques to enhance the quality of regional provision.

The North West Foundation Placement Scheme was showcased to Commissioner Spidla as an exemplar of work-based training and positive action measures to promote diversity and inclusion as part of the EU UK Presidency Conference during October 2005.

Northwest Vision and Media won a regional training award in the category of ‘Innovation in Workforce Development in the Creative and Media Industries’ in 2005.

ESF Equal funds have enabled Northwest Vision and Media to achieve the following:

• to work with and learn from a large, diverse partnership across sub-sectors of the creative and cultural industries
• to be ‘approach’-driven rather than just ‘target-focused’
• to provide an environment where ‘failure’ may be viewed positively and used constructively to inform future development and delivery
• to develop an organic and flexible framework in order to be responsive and demand-driven and capitalise on unforeseen regional, national and international opportunities
• to (via the key Equal principles of innovation, empowerment and equal opportunity) focus our activities and provide us with a consistent yardstick when making decisions against development and delivery throughout the project life-cycle
• to support beneficiaries over a longer period of time; consequently the provision has been more responsive to individual/employer need
• to assist development of regional training infrastructure, to test different formal and informal methods for learning, and bridge gaps in regional provision.