The charity work you can support in your local schools

How do you give money to a charity for free?

Education Technology Community (ETC) Charity is funded to undertake a charitable project in a school, each time an employer of any size places a member of staff on an Apprenticeship Training Programme with Commun-IT. This helps towards Commun-IT’s mission to support education at all levels, whilst operationally we deliver post-16 training ourselves.

We cannot help but be amazed at the impact ETC has had in schools and on children, teachers and parents. We will continue to support them post-covid-19, and the best part of it is that this is at no extra cost to employers who train their apprentices with us. Aside from this community initiative, we have many other reasons why organisations should select Commun-IT as their training provider.

Imagine if you can have these charitable projects take place at a local school of your choice:

IDEAS Bus School Visit
A 40ft yellow American School Bus kitted out with the latest in technology equipment in order to educate the community.

The bus has been set up to foster curiosity and excitement around the purpose of technology in our lives, its uses and the considerations around it such as safety and wellness.

Our students enjoyed the coding activities and the chance to engage with virtual reality products and fascinating robots. The staff involved learned about some cutting edge technologies and commented on the high level of engagement from our students.

Ashley College

The Education Technology Community (ETC) Charity is engaging the IDEAS Bus to deliver impact in local schools. Hundreds of schools have already been visited since the bus’ inception. After the disruption to all our young people’s school experience due to covid-19, it is more important than ever to engage them and teach them in more effective ways.

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The IDEAS Bus is driving a mission of its own. It offers Executive staff the opportunity to network and take various tours such as of London, or Smart City initiatives. The tech team behind the bus are even producing a Hazard Perception Game for Digital and Online Threats. Have you ever wondered why people are rigorously tested and approved before they can drive a vehicle, but there is no measure in place to ensure safety in the digital realm? Identity theft, financial fraud – the threats are real and severe and people are affected daily. Within a day of losing your identity information, you could find yourself in crippling debt. Fraudsters continue to take people’s life savings through constantly changing methods.

You can read more about the bus in particular here.

From the moment the Ideas Bus arrived on site our children were excited to see what wonders the bus held…Children across all year groups were able to engage purposefully with a range of up-to-date technology including virtual reality headsets and a 3D printer.

Hadley Wood Primary School

Commun-IT has found that businesses are always either training current staff or hiring new ones. This means that as we continue to train apprentices for employers, our contribution to the ETC’s charity work in schools can be sustained. ETC are the first ever to establish a way for higher education to directly propel lower education in creative and digital skills.

After School Clubs
Enjoyable clubs to nurture and drive excellence in creative and digital skills that improve career prospects

We have found amongst our apprentices and employers that people’s definition for their own success is underpinned by two things: knowledge and skill. Although it’s not defined in the picturesque description of what success looks like, through further elaboration we always uncover in our tailored training programmes that a vision of success requires certain knowledge and skills to get there. We thought about how to enable young people, earlier in their lives, to form clearer and realistic visions of their own. We found two things: passion and opportunity. When you pair a young person’s passion with an opportunity to exercise all their thrilling ambitions and objectives, you see the magic of human nature. Our education system nationally is responsible for doing this but it does not do it well. That’s where ETC’s After School Club initiative is a real change maker.

Within a few weeks of a club in a creative (e.g. photography) or digital skill (e.g. coding), children start sharing insights of their own. They see the relevance of the skill in the wider world: they look more carefully at how these things are influencing their life and they start to identify what place they have in their own goals.

You can read more about the clubs here.

“I like Coding Club because it’s cool to create your own programme that your friends can play.” – Year 5

“Doing Coding has made me better at using a keyboard, as I know what each key now does. I also understand how games like PACMAN work.” – Year 6

“As a creative person I really enjoy being able to code my own story with different outcomes.” – Year 8

Remember, in order to have a charity project take place at a school of your choice, you can:

• hire an apprentice
• train any current member of staff
• introduce us to someone who might train staff or recruit new staff
• Did you know that employers can receive a £3,000 cash incentive to do this? It expires soon.