Greater insight into post-16 learning and skills demand informs recruitment and curriculum planning.
Hugh Callaway
Executive Director of Marketing and Learner Services
Grimsby Institute of Further & Higher Education
The problem
As one of the largest providers of further and higher education in England, the Grimsby Institute covers an extensive area spread across multiple regions. As such they require detailed and reliable insight into the learner market and unique skills requirements for each of the local communities they serve. This is seen as vital to support effective recruitment and to inform the curriculum planning process.
The solution
The Grimsby Institute commissioned RCU to produce a customised Vector tool which offered greater insight into their core local learner markets in Grimsby, Lincolnshire and Scarborough. This was designed to cover multiple regions ensuring the college could explore the unique profile of demand around each of the multiple campuses included within the group.
For each of their core regions, the Vector tool provided access to trends in learner demand, the college’s market share and the curriculum delivery with comparisons to other providers. The data was linked to key sectors to identify local skills needs as well as forward school leaver projections to model future cohort sizes.
The outcome
The detailed understanding Vector affords has resulted in significant benefits for the Grimsby Institute. In particular, they find the mapping feature to be invaluable given the wide area from which it recruits and use Vector in this way to understand potential school liaison activities and transport travel plans, as well as to identify areas and postcodes it can target specifically for advertising activity.
Vector’s detailed curriculum tables and sector based labour market information (LMI) are used on an annual cycle to inform curriculum planning and purchase and the tool is also used throughout the year for marketing and ad-hoc information requirements.
Grimsby Institute also use the school leaver forecast data in strategic planning, to help identify potential demand in future years, and found the deprivation data to be very advantageous in a recent Ofsted inspection.