New £50,000 Grant Funding
New grant funding from Ufi VocTech Trust is open for applications until 11th February offering £15k to £50k for innovative uses of tech in vocational learning.
VocTech Seed is a testbed where the first spark of an idea can be scoped and developed in the supportive environment that Ufi funding provides.
This funding round allows projects to explore ideas that have the potential to make a difference at scale in the world of vocational learning. The Trust is looking for ideas that use digital tech to make it easier and quicker to learn workplace skills. VocTech Seed can be the first step in taking a project from a prototype to one which has been market tested and ready for wider launch.
Many innovative projects that were supported by previous rounds of VocTech Seed funding are now beginning to live up to their early potential. Learning Labs, for example, were awarded VocTech Seed funding in 2017. They had already developed a successful school platform called Flash Academy to help children that do not have English as their first language. They wanted to develop their platform for the workplace and test it with large and SME manufacturing employers whose workforces needed English language skills.
The Flash Academy Workplace platform has since been launched and is improving workplace health & safety by teaching languages more effectively.
Veejay Lingiah, CEO of Learning Labs said:
Ufi funding and their mentoring support really helped us take the leap of faith into this new area of vocational learning that otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to attempt.
Ufi have been fantastic in terms of helping us navigate the uncertainty of outcome in a project like this and helping us get from a starting point to something that’s actually being used in reality by employers every day.
LTE Group & Manchester College used VocTech Seed funding in 2019 to change construction training, so that students are better prepared for their first day on the job.
Their gamification project bridges the gap between education and the real world of construction, giving students the opportunity to fully explore the environment, tools, materials, machinery and building techniques of a virtual construction site. Through increasingly challenging tasks learners build increasingly complex structures.
