Idea Store Learning Staff Awards

Winner: Christine Coker

Nominated by Annarita Mazzilli

Despite delivering her Mindfulness courses online, Christine was able, not only, to create a friendly and calm environment to meditate but also a safe space for self-reflection and exchange of personal experiences within the group.

Students were provided with tools to apply their learning also outside of class time, through practical tasks, questionnaires, online instruction videos and guidance on how to keep a personal diary/log. Students were able to share their findings with the rest of the group and to re-connect with their own body and mind after months of isolation due to COVID.

Christine’s pre and post observation of teaching and learning documents, demonstrated not only good planning but especially the ability to objectively self-evaluate her teaching practice, by taking into consideration students’ feedback and their responses to her teaching methods and strategies. This has pushed her to try out new ideas, out of her comfort zone and to grow as tutor.

Winner: Phyllis Acosta

Nominated by Jane Carter-Dunn

Phyllis delivers our Community Interpreting courses. She is committed to the success of her learners from initial interviews, through initial assessment to completion of their qualifications and helping them with their next steps.

This year Phyllis delivered a partnership course with East London NHS Trust for learners with mental health issues who were making their first steps back into learning and employment. Phyllis supported them throughout, working closely with the Trust, and several learners have now moved onto the Level 3 qualification with The Language Shop where they will be employed as interpreters when they have completed.

The Trust hosted a recognition ceremony at the end of the course and it was humbling to hear the learners describe what a difference the course had made to their confidence and belief in themselves. They were all appreciative of the support they had received from Phyllis along the way.

Winner: Jagdeep Chatha

Nominated by Nicholas Beer

Jagdeep has shown his dedication to the learners and delivery of his classes throughout. He has been an invaluable member of the vocational team patiently working through any problems. Despite having a more difficult year, has carried on without complaint even at more stressful times of the year. He has always been a professional, willing to listen to others and has fostered a sense of team within the vocational department.

Jag is very obviously dedicated to his learners and provides them a high standard of teaching. He has had very good feedback throughout and has achieved high success rates despite the more challenging Functional Skills Maths exams.

This year, he has started teaching a new subject area and accredited course – Essential Digital Skills. Despite it being new, he has taken on the challenge and has had excellent feedback and success rates with the learners.

He’s been a pleasure to work with, and consistently aims to improve teaching delivery and the experience for learners; whether through contributing ideas for the planning of delivery or working to ensure his own teaching is of the highest standard. For these reasons, Jagdeep deserves recognition as a tutor who has provided excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Winner: Digital Team: Bob Stuart and John Philpot

Nominated by Jane Carter Dunn, Nicholas Beer, Victoria Holmes and Nikki Chatha

Bob created the promotional materials for Green Week and then in just one evening (the night before our event), spliced together learner environmental pledge photos and videos collected during the week to make an excellent video to show at our event. Much of this work was completed out of hours to ensure we had it on time for the event, showing that he will go above and beyond.

John travelled across the borough during the week taking photographs of cycling sessions, litter picking, farm trips and food waste workshops in store, sometimes visiting more than one place in one day. He would then promptly convert these photos into informative Tweets and Instagram posts to really raise the profile of the aims of the week to a wider audience. John also came along to the main event to capture the key moments in photographs.

As well as our specific events he has also helped to update our website pages, ensuring the information is current and accessible to potential learners, create promotional material for the Write Idea Short Story Competition, and update our attendance certificate for learners. These are all updated very efficiently with an extremely quick turnaround – this really supports the whole team to provide service excellence.

I have had good support from this team as always and response times have been excellent. When we are trying to save a class there is no time to request things well in advance. Posters and flyers are produced promptly and are ready to get out to the stores to advertise these classes.

The Team also worked with me to create an online enquiry form for ICT learners to completed and now we get a good number of enquiries each term to follow up via this route.

Winner: Clementina Cross

Nominated by Brian Birch

Clementina is an excellent tutor, who is not phased by technology, but embraces it to see how it can work for her and her learners. This is evident during classroom observations of her courses.

During our B Term 2022 moderation, Clementina demonstrated how well she had adapted to providing electronic course documentation and materials for learners, by presenting the team with exemplary electronic course files using Google Classroom. Her support for learners in transitioning to Google Classroom, as a learning resource is also exemplary.

Clementina is also an outstanding photography tutor and has built up an ongoing strong relationship with Tower Project delivering photography courses to their LLDD learners. The support and enthusiasm we receive from feedback from Tower Project and their learners is excellent and is a strong testament to Clementina’s teaching.

Winner: Virginia Hawke

Nominated by Brian Birch

Virginia is a very versatile tutor and works across different curriculum areas in visual arts, mixed media, and printmaking. Virginia demonstrates very strong dedication to her learners and on making improvements within her teaching practice.

Virginia lessons have a good balance of theory and practice and allow all learners to engage to develop new skills at pace appropriate to their individual needs. There is good embedding of equality and diversity with learners given the opportunity to discuss their work its influences and planning to make progress during the lesson.

Recently Virginia has supported all her learners to make work to display in exhibitions. This year has seen an increase this activity with learners displaying their mixed media projects at the Brady Arts Centre, Shadwell Centre and more recently a solo exhibition of one of her learners Stephen Walker at the Yurt Café.

These exhibitions really bring to life the work which Virginia promotes with her learners.

Winner: Angela Onelum

Nominated by Nikki Chatha

Angela continues to be an outstanding and dynamic English teacher who skilfully engages all her learners and those around her.

She is valued throughout Idea Store Learning due to her subject knowledge as well as her passion for engaging hard to reach learners including those who have been out of education for long periods of time and those with wide ranging additional learning needs.

Angela works collaboratively with other tutors, management and wider support staff to secure the best outcomes for learners. She constantly plays a positive and active role across our team and supports tutors to enhance their knowledge of the current Functional Skills curriculum and upcoming qualifications.

Angela has been undertaking a self-directed Dyslexia qualification, accredited by the British Dyslexia Association. She has supported the learner services team with the knowledge she has learnt and has been able to refer and signpost learners to the extra support they have needed.

She liaises extremely well with the learner services in relation to learner support and has provided bespoke teacher support, where required. The additional Dyslexia support workshops she facilitates gives learners the confidence and reassurance that their needs are accounted for and met throughout their courses and exams. Further to this, she works tirelessly to provide additional support outside of class time to those learners who have wide-ranging complex needs.

Winner: Rahnuma Noor

Nominated by Nicholas Beer, Victoria Holmes and Nikki Chatha

Rahnuma is a hardworking and highly motivated ICT and Employability tutor who is an integral part of the PfLW team.

When the Covid pandemic hit, Rahnuma ensured our learners, the most vulnerable and hard to reach, could still access learning even if it moved online.

She produced a series of videos, voice notes and presentations for the tutor team and learners explaining how they could access Zoom through their phones. The instructions were detailed through a step-by-step process, learners followed the instructions whilst listening to her.

She gave examples of using an iPhone or an Android device and how they can access Zoom, Teams and Google Drive. Incredibly she did this bilingually, she was able to explain in English and then translate in Bengali and Sylheti. This ensured that our learners were not hinder or disadvantaged from accessing learning. The videos were high quality and shared with our partners at the Bromley By Bow Centre to support their learners who were facing similar issues accessing online learning.

Rahnuma worked with resilience throughout the pandemic, she did not allow it to become a barrier to our learners engaging and progressing in learning. The encouragement she has given to learners has ensured that they are more aware of the opportunities available to them outside of Idea Store Learning. Many now use their digital devices to access Google Drive, children’s homework, shop, pay bills and generally feel more confident in using ICT.

Winner: Business Support Team - Transactions

Nominated by Nikki Chatha and Creative Industries Management

The Transactions team have been a very supportive and proactive team over the past two years. I have worked closely with Christine Alleyne and Elena M Dellamura and both have been outstanding members of the team. Both members of staff show great depth of knowledge and experience, their support has always been integral to purchases for the PfLW team.

No issue or query is ever too big or complex for them and they come back to us promptly and professionally with an informed answer or resolution. This is particularly important with regards to matters of finance and ensuring we are paying the correct debtors or purchasing the right equipment timely.

Christine and Elena have a can-do attitude which instils confidence in PFLW and enables us to feel very comfortable in approaching them for help or advice. This approach when working in a council empowers us all to work openly and transparently.

Our Business Support Transaction team, lead by Christine Alleyne, has been very helpful to us in ordering the materials we need for all our courses on a regular basis. They would place our orders swiftly and ask for clarification when placing the orders.

When the orders have been placed, they would get back to us with the invoice the supplier has sent to confirm that the materials being ordered are exactly what we wanted, before going ahead with it. Without the swift action from this team, we would not have been able to run many of our courses smoothly.