Jobs Education and Training

Postive role models can inspire others: Jobs Education and Training (JET)

Established:2002
Community-led action:
_ Employment and training centre
_ Volunteering programme
_ After school programme and mentoring schemes
_ Community awards

For more information visit: www.jetderby.co.uk

Lessons for others:
JET has taken a view from the Board downwards that the trust needs three funding streams: rental income, grant funding wherever possible and earned income through delivery of courses, but the golden rule is that we will not charge local people.

A vision for local change
Jobs Education and Training (JET) was initially created by local people to help young Muslims in the Normanton area of Derby to access training and employment. For Mohammed Sharief, life long resident of Normanton and Executive Director of JET, one key objective has been to encourage positive role models from the local community.

For decades Mohammed Sharief could see the devastating effects of unemployment. Normanton has the largest concentration of Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Derby, and as illustrated by recent reports from the Joseph Rowntree foundation, ethnic minority groups are twice as likely to experience poverty and unemployment. Then in 2002, he decided it was time to do something about it: “a group of us got together and decided to use a grassroots approach to transform the area of Normanton.” They believed it was important to create an organisation that would be anchored into the local community, and the fact that JET’s Board and staff team are almost entirely made up of local people, means that it is able to harness that passion and vision for local change to create solutions.

Growing local role models
JET’s core objective was to help local people find quality jobs. But what JET found in Normanton was that barriers to employment were being felt particularly strongly by women of Pakistani origin partly because they were not being actively encouraged to pursue further education and a career of their own. JET decided to address this problem in two main ways: firstly by helping young Muslim girls from local schools to gain confidence and raise their aspirations, and secondly by supporting local women into employment so that they could become positive role models for the younger generation.

JET’s advice centre is located in the heart of the community providing help with interview techniques, job searches, support for training and employment, and one of the strengths of the project is that the majority of its advisors are local people who can directly relate to local issues. This has proved a great help in breaking down some deepseated obstacles to change, particularly with women in the community. There is now a growing number of excellent role models for young girls in Normanton, whom JET gives recognition to at its annual community awards ceremony. The women who work at JET are able to instil confidence in others who want to find training and employment, and because they speak their languages, they can also engage with those in the community who only speak English as a second language. Hundreds of people are now using the centre every day, and over the last few years JET has more or less doubled its turnover every year, whilst demand for its services has increased to full capacity. With all these successes have come new challenges, and JET is now embarking on an ambitious plan to expand its site to increase the number of learners they can help and the amount of income they can generate. Part of their challenge will be to secure long term support from investors, but for Mohammed Sharief JET’s biggest challenge will remain that of raising people’s aspirations in Normanton.

Read more stories of development trusts who have made it their business to tackle poverty issues at a local level in our publication On the Borderline: Development Trusts Tackling Poverty in the UK.