Skills for Life Training, Basic Skills, Resettlement Training.

What is the Roundabout Training Team?

The Roundabout Training Team operates across Roundabout's schemes to provide training in basic skills, skills for life and resettlement training to Roundabout service users.

Aims of the Roundabout Training Team

The Roundabout Training Team exists to provide quality, focused support for young people with resettlement needs. It addresses these needs by providing training sessions that run in conjunction with resettlement work and practice across the organisation as a whole. Young people’s support needs are assessed in their initial meeting with their keyworker and referred on to the Training Team. While young people are with us, their training needs and referrals are continually updated in keywork sessions through observation, in discussion and through self identification.

Training is taken to the learner at the point of contact, and is designed to encourage and motivate young people to move on, to learn more and to become more self-sufficient, centred around resettlement and tenancy sustainment.

Who is it aimed at?

The team intend to work with all Roundabout service users. The training is offered at different levels and is tailored to individual need. It is learner centred and is as inclusive as possible given the chaotic lifestyle of the service user group.

How the scheme works

Roundabout training provides core training around resettlement issues. It also responds to need putting on additional training in citizenship, non-oppressive practice and issues such as self-harm and depression awareness. It is a service that adapts to changing needs and embraces new ideas in the fight to support young people in breaking the cycle of homelessness and successfully reintegrating into the community. Moreover it is a service that fully includes the learners themselves in the need for and in the direction of the training so that they become full members in a team effort towards the process of resettlement.

At the hostel, training is offered every afternoon in 1 – 2 hour sessions, around themed weeks and includes participation and activity sessions. For young people in dispersed housing or supported in their own tenancies, full day sessions are offered, once a week on a 6 week out of 8 basis. Young people living at the hostel who have completed the training there and who are looking to move on to their own tenancies, are encouraged to attend the full day sessions in resettlement training.

All young people are encouraged to attend training. Their progress in addressing their resettlement needs is recorded and evidenced in their portfolio, ultimately building into a hand book of independent living skills. This work is accredited through the Open College Network system and young people are able to submit their portfolios for accreditation if they wish. The inclusive nature of the programme means that the young people who start but do not complete the programme can return to it at any point in the future and their prior learning will be credited.

We are not here to train people and walk away. We are part of the process of work alongside young people to support them in their own personal attempts and struggle to move away from a position of homelessness to one of full integration and membership of society. Young people are not forced to attend any of the training. Those who do are offered the support and the opportunity to take themselves forward to a more stable and integrated future.