Young people at Prior’s Court are now accessing a revised programme of vocational skills learning to equip them with the knowledge and experience they need in the world of work.

For the 2023/24 academic year, our Vocational Skills Area of Learning, which is accessed by young people in Post-16 and our Young Adult Provision (YAP), has been consolidated into two learning programmes – land-based and hospitality – based on employment sectors.

Young people who are learning as part of the programmes gain skills in:

• Land-based:
  • Orchard – nurturing and growing apple trees on our site.
  • Grounds maintenance – pressure washing patios and paths, laying bark chip paths, painting outdoor sheds and fences, and more.
  • Grounds gardening – lawn mowing, strimming, leaf blowing, hedge-trimming and more.
  • Nursery – growing fruit, vegetables and flowers and learning the skills as part of these processes.
• Hospitality:
  • Customer service including reception and retail – meeting and greeting, stocktaking, payment handling and more.
  • Housekeeping including commercial laundry – cleaning rooms and windows, using industrial floor cleaners, operating laundry machines and more.
  • Conference services including room set up and porterage – setting up meeting and training rooms, ensuring refreshments are in place, providing a porterage service and more.
  • Food and beverage incorporating our bakery, a café and barista training – preparing drinks and simple meals, hosting and serving customers in a café, and learning to make baked goods in our industry-standard bakery.

The tweaks to the hospitality learning programme have also led to the revamp of two rooms on-site to be solely used as training areas for learning housekeeping skills, including having beds to practice bed-making.

Young people in Post-16 and YAP are also taught Readiness to Work skills to prepare them for entering the world of work. These are skills such as manual handling, wearing PPE, focus and productivity among other topics.

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Nickie Dunphy, our Young People’s Learning Lead for Vocational Skills, said: “Our ambition for young people in post-16 and YAP is to give them the skills they need to enter the world of work. We recognise that due to the complexities and challenges that many of our young people face, this may be an experience or work placement within the organisation rather than the community, but we still ensure this has purpose and meaning.

“Our recently-released 2022-23 young person skills progress data shows a huge step forward in vocational skills learnt last year. With these changes to the Area of Learning, we are confident even more young people are going to learn even more work-related skills.”

Find out more about what our young people learn