Sometimes the best idea isn’t the most original, and you aren’t sure if your cunning new plan for the organisation will be possible, land with the membership and have the impact you hope it will have.  

Sometimes, that idea doesn’t go as you hope (and we have had our share of those I promise) and sometimes, just sometimes, you get a piece of feedback in your inbox that lets you know that the idea you had a couple of years ago is doing exactly what you’d hoped it was going to.  

Such is the case with ICVA’s e-learning platform. Now, before we continue, I apologise for this being horribly self-congratulatory on the part of ICVA, but also, and despite our generally ‘get on with it’ vibe as an organisation, our work on the e-learning platform is a good news story, and don’t we all need and love those, so here we go!  

ICVA is a small but mighty (one of our members calls ICVA tallawa for this very reason) charity of just 3.2 FTE at the time of this cunning plan, and to bring the idea to the point of launch an awful lot of research and some nerve-wracking choices needed to be made. I won’t give you all of the details of us learning what an LMS is (learning management system it turns out, who knew) what a SCORM package is (I fear Jenna is still the only one who truly understands this) and many, many more things along the way.  

 Suffice to say, the platform was launched, we were excited and nervous, it was prepopulated with a whopper of an induction for new ICVs (8 hours of guided learning) as well as a range of other courses, with more to be added as time progresses.  

We now have 15 courses on our platform, we have over 900 users, and independent custody visitors (ICVs) have completed over 2,700 courses! This is fantastic. I didn’t ever think that people would take to it so quickly or so well. I think a massive part of that is the quality of the training that we produce on there, and for that we have Jenna to thank. Just one person writing all of the training, making it engaging, importantly making it accessible and launching it really is fantastic.   

So, back to the cunning plan and what I wanted our e-learning to achieve. One of the things that schemes were telling us was that where there were delays in vetting of newly appointed volunteers, the length of time vetting would take would mean they would lose volunteers along the way as they understandably disengaged with the lack of activity. The other thing we got fed back a lot was that induction needed to cover more, but there was only so much training that could be delivered in a day, by scheme managers who often don’t have a massive amount of time to give all of the complex information that custody demands. It occurred to me that there was no reason why we couldn’t let schemes add newly appointed volunteers ahead of their vetting, they were welcome to undertake the induction in the interim.  

As I said, you often don’t know if what you thought would happen way back when we said ‘let’s have an e-learning platform’ and don’t get me wrong, the stats are amazing and I am really very pleased with them indeed. But then we got an email from one of our brilliant members. I have, with their permission, put the whole of the email below as it was so lovely to receive, and a fab example of when one of those ideas turns out how you had hoped.  

I just wanted to drop you a message to share with you how well the online ICVA Induction training complimented our recruitment round this year!  

We did all our interviews end of May with in-person training early September, strategically planned to allow the summer holidays to process vetting and to give the newbies plenty of time to complete the ICVA induction package online. 

Not only did they all complete the training (yay!), it was sooo easy to track where people were, and see which of them took the initiative to complete the other modules available to them. 

Then, this past Saturday we hosted our in-person training! It went so incredibly well, the discussion was more lively, more engaging and it seemed that the group really absorbed what was in the online training! They also complimented the training with how easy it was to follow and how informative it was. I had reviewed the training myself before the session so we were able to tailor our presentations to remove things already covered in depth, and so we knew what we could test people on! It was clear the online training had a huge impact, we all walked away absolutely thrilled with how the day went and how well the ICVs seemed to understand the role from the first five minutes before we even began!   

I can’t express enough how well this recruitment drive went, not only were the ICVs referring to the online training when they asked us questions, it kept everyone engaged whilst we waited for vetting. I didn’t have a single volunteer drop out during the summer either (other than two failed vetting)! We have 16 new ICVs, fully inducted and ready to go, and I really do attribute the success to the online training. 

I can’t even imagine how much work went into setting it all up, but I know it can’t have been a quick or easy task. Well done, and thank you so much for all the effort put into the training. It really changed how we do things for the better. 

All the best 

Jade 

In some ways I wanted to write this to say that we had done well, but really and truly, the more I have written the more I realise that this is a thank you letter to my team, our membership and the ICVs.   

To the team, thank you for working so incredibly hard to bring this to fruition, and to Jenna, thank you for continuing to produce incredibly high standards of learning!  

To our membership, thank you for having the faith in us to produce something for you and agreeing to support us financially to do it. Jade, you taking the time to write to us and give us such great feedback is so, so appreciated.  

To the ICVs, thank you so much for engaging with our training, for completing it, and for all the work you do to make sure that independent custody visiting is monitoring to be proud of.  

We will continue to build on the platform, responding to the needs of our members, developing more training for the scheme managers and in the interim, I’m off to think more modest thoughts…