Winter 2000

The National Lottery Charities Board

We have been successful in our bid for a new lottery grant!

We have been awarded a total of £166,866 over the next 3 years. This money will provide the core funding for staff salaries.

The importance of this grant cannot be overstated. We can now build on the security this gives us and offer more courses to satisfy the growing demand.

The numbers

This term we are running 22 different courses attended by 121 students.

Of these 20 are doing City & Guilds courses lasting for 2 terms.

Monitoring & Evaluation

The independent evaluation of the project is going ahead and we hope to receive the report in January.

We will use this report to try to persuade even more organisations to purchase courses or to provide funding.

If you would like a copy of the report please let us know.

Thank you to Chris Wells of Bull Information Systems Ltd and Sue Reed for their invaluable help in designing a database to enable us to effectively monitor the project.

We will be able to install this system when we have upgraded our office computer.

The view of OFSTED

In October one of the schools that has students at the project was inspected by OFSTED.

SKIDZ was asked to be part of the inspection and one of the inspectors spent a morning with us.

Mr Tom Smith reported that:

"The excellent motor vehicle maintenance course, provided through the High Wycombe SKIDZ project, is very effective in preparing pupils for the world of work."

The view of Peter Wild, Head of Service, The Wycombe Grange

"SKIDZ has continued to be an invaluable resource within the Wycombe Area, particularly with our more vocationally orientated students.

Activities have included motor vehicle maintenance, First Gear driving courses, go-kart building, quad biking and self-esteem building.

Their flexible and innovative approach has complimented us extremely well. Students moving on from SKIDZ courses have had improved opportunities to find work in related fields."

Some Bad News

Last week we had 3 quad bikes and 3 motorbikes stolen from an off-site storage facility.

Even though the owner and ourselves had provided security including padlocked gates, building and machines and also a guard dog, the thieves still managed to get away undetected.

This will restrict but not stop our activities but if anyone can help with replacing the equipment we would love to speak to you.

Thank you

Thank you for your continued support, if you know of anyone who might be interested in the work we are doing please let us know so that we can contact them.