No images? Click here Greetings from the Food & Fibre CoVE team & welcome to our monthly newsletter. Update from the GM We are now well and truly settled into our new office space and feeling more and more at home each day. The website continues to evolve and many of you will have received an email from Nicola asking you to, using the membership application page, apply officially for membership of the FFCoVE Society. That request went to all original consortium members. As this newsletter goes now, to a much wider audience, we invite anyone who is interested in joining the FFCoVE Society, to use the application page and sign up. You will find this here, it's free and by joining, you or your organisation help add to the energy of the FFCoVE activity. By the way, we are also now running both a LinkedIn and a Facebook Page, (see links at he bottom of this newsletter). Most set up administration is complete or very near completion and we look forward to the final signing of the Memorandum of Agreement between Te Pūkenga and the Food and Fibre CoVE which at the time of writing is imminent.
We continue to build relationships and as a result we have joined The Global Apprentice Network (GAN) New Zealand and have agreed to sign a Mana Enhancing Agreement with Ako Aotearoa. Both these organisations exist to ensure the success of learners and employers in the vocational education and training space and beyond, while complimenting and informing the mission of the FFCoVE. We look forward to working with these two organisations in the future. It has also been great to meet with Hawkes Bay Regional Skills Leadership Group Lead, Jo Lawrence and also Fiona Clark a local MPI senior advisor, the work that these people are doing compliments that of the FFCoVE. I am sure together that we will have a long and prosperous relationship along with their colleagues from around the country as we, and I borrow from the words of the late Sir Ken Robinson here, “seek not just to help reform education in the Food and Fibre Industry but lead the transforming of it”. Along with the FFCoVE Board we visited Miraka in Taupo last week and spent some time with Grant Jackson GM Milk Supply. Grant led us through the Te Ara Miraka Farming Excellence programme. This is another excellent example of positive disruption in training and doing business and one that FFCoVE is keen to watch develop and support. As I said earlier we continue to build relationships and look forward to meeting many of you over the next short while, as time and resources permit. Ngā mihi A message from Board Chair, You will see in this newsletter that Paul has been busy connecting with organisations across the food and fibre sector. This engagement is vital to the COVE. The Board is focused on delivering timely, relevant, and accurate information to consortium members, as we identify and share examples of vocational excellence across the sector. Each Board meeting, we plan to visit exemplars of excellence in workplace training. Our first visit was to the T&G packhouse in Hastings. In-depth discussions of culture change in the workplace, and the role of workplace training in a Covid disrupted season, highlighted the resilience of teams when management invested in their people. At our latest Board meeting, we visited Miraka in Taupo. The Te Ara Miraka farming excellence programme pursues excellence along the value chain (starting with excellent farming practice) by growing the skills base in farming and processing teams. This inspirational programme provides a fully integrated approach that links skills with business performance. This week’s budget announcement has allocated an additional $279.5m for vocational education. While this is welcome news, we need to ensure the highly talented people in our training and education system are supported and encouraged to continue to grow their careers. Change is always unsettling. Retaining our best and brightest is essential to minimise disruption through the change process, and to ensuring any additional funding works most effectively for our learners in the food and fibre sector. Project update The three Foundation projects are now really gaining momentum. We are partnering with our friends at EIT’s IT department to build a SharePoint based Data Management System that will also be the home of all the information we make available for you to access and use in the future. Building an Evaluation Framework, for which we recently signed the contract with the consultancy that will undertake this work, will be complete a little later in the year followed closely by the Taking Stock project. This project which will inform us and you, of what is available, what is good and what can be made better in the Food and Fibre Vocational Education and Training world, is due to get underway officially within the month. Other projects which were proposed last year by stakeholders as the FFCoVE was being developed as a concept are also now being set up to start officially. In almost all cases there was a lot of duplication of ideas. We have consolidated the nearly 30 original ideas into, initially, six and recently, wrote to all original proposers telling them of what we had done and have asked them to collaborate, in order that the original ideas can be fleshed out and supported by FFCoVE. The projects to have been given this treatment to date are; Micro-credential Framework, Product handling and Spoilage Minimisation and Work Integrated Learning. We are talking separately with the proposers of Attracting and Retaining Trainers and Maori Cadetships along with parties interested in the Remote Learning initiatives. As we said last month and will repeat regularly the original proposals were by no means and exhaustive list and if, collectively, we are all keen to transform and then develop excellence in vocational education and training across the Food and Fibre Industry we will need to do a lot more and develop some very meaty projects over the next short while. We are keen to hear from you if you have ideas to help enable this approach. |