Our key partners

WorldSkills London 2011 is the world’s largest, international skills competition where young people from across the globe compete to become the best of the best. At stake: the honour of being the greatest in the world at their chosen skill.

The competition will take place from 5-8 October 2011 at ExCeL London – bringing together 1,000 young people from 50 nations to compete in 45 skills areas from six sectors, ranging from creative arts and fashion to transportation and logistics. The scale of the event is enormous – ExCeL London has over 90,000m2 of space, the equivalent of ten Wembley Stadium pitches.

However WorldSkills London 2011 is more than just a competition. Every community and business in the UK thrives on skills, enterprise and inspiration and WorldSkills London 2011 aims to be the catalyst that sparks the ambitions not just of competitors but of people across the UK.

The WorldSkills 2011 team is working with colleges, schools, training providers, sponsors and partners to develop a detailed programme of WorldSkills London 2011 - Have a Go activities to take place from now up until the competition. These events and activities will culminate in a three-week, showcase of skills (19 September– 9 October 2011) – giving people around the UK the chance to have a go at a range of new skills and to explore the possibilities their futures could hold.

Visit the website to find out more about the WorldSkills London 2011 events, to discover how your organisation could take part or to sign up for the volunteer programme.

DofE Business is a Gold Duke of Edinburgh’s Award for employees and addresses the skills needs of businesses. The 18-month programme delivers essential skills to employees in the workplace such as confidence, team-working, improved communication, leadership and resilience.

 DofE Business is a flexible development tool that can be integrated within or complementary to existing training and development programmes including apprenticeships. A level, graduate or other schemes.  DofE Business can also link with and enhance your company’s Corporate Responsibility agenda. It promotes volunteering, involvement in the community, a better understanding of the environment and a healthier and fitter workforce.

Towards Maturity supports those who are responsible for delivering effective learning in the workplace, at whatever stage of your journey.

Our best practice benchmarking activities have shown that organisations mature in the use of technology perform better in the areas of business impact, staff impact and increased takeup of e-learning.

Our aim is to help organisations grow and learn from the results of our formal benchmarking activity and to benchmark informally through our wide selection of case studies and employer stories.

This overview provides a summary of some of the best practices that influence success - the Towards Maturity Model focusses on 6 strands which collectively entwine to help improve learning technology innovation and impact in the work place. These 6 strands form the basis of our underlying benchmark process and are constantly reviewed and recallibrated with each benchmark study.

Under each strand, we have provided links to some examples of measurable activities that improve business impact of learning technologies at work. These links will take you to relevant case studies, research and updates in this area.

If you are brand new to e-learning, we also have tips for getting started.

The Six Book Challenge invites less confident readers to read six books and record their reading in a diary in order to receive incentives, a certificate and the chance to enter a national prize draw. The idea is to help people get into reading - in many cases for the first time.

The Reading Agency launched the Six Book Challenge in 2008. Since then an estimated 29,.500 people have registered for the scheme and 12,000 have completed it.

• Over two-thirds of library services across the UK take part each year, working in partnership with local colleges, adult education, family learning, children's centres, prisons and workplaces.
• 40 colleges purchased materials directly in 2010 and many more worked with their local library service
• Around 50 prisons and YOIs took part in 2010
• 90 workplaces were involved ranging from local councils to Transport for London, Warburtons, NHS Trusts, Tesco and Corus Steelworks