Unipol Training Programme 2008 - 2009

Dear Colleague

Firstly, we have now developed our own training facility here at Unipol which will enable us to run more smaller, dedicated and specialised events for less cost because we will no longer have the fear of meeting hotel cancellation changes for unsuccessful or underbooked modules. This will also enable us to experiment more with both content and format.

Secondly, next year's outline training programme is coming together with an emphasis on:

•     customer care and student care
•     the community
•     housing management techniques
•     the interplay of policy and practice (in a volatile market)

and, as ever, keeping up to date with developments in the sector as they happen.

As a colleague, I would welcome any views or thoughts you might have about matters that we could cover or should include and your ideas and input are an important part of bringing our programme together. We do, of course, already receive a lot of feedback through evaluation sheets and general contact, but this does not really cover all the bases and if you have any thoughts I would be grateful for them.

Please feel free to e-mail me at conferences@unipol.leeds.ac.uk or phone on 0113 2053404. Any contribution will be gratefully accepted. Up to date details of our training can always be found on www.unipol.org.uk/training.

Can I also thank you for your support of our training programme last year which was our most satisfying so far. Satisfying not only in terms of attendance but in terms of both the quality of delegates and their active participation and contribution to the events we ran. Last year we held 36 training events, seminars and conferences (not including the in-house training we organised directly with individual establishments) with 1,490 delegates attending from 270 educational institutions.

The whole training operation is designed to break-even and, with assistance from Liberty Living's sponsorship which contributed around £25 to each delegate place from an educational institution, this year we did actually break even.

Any help, assistance or feedback you can give would be much appreciated.

Finally, can I thank you for you time in reading this and wish you a good summer as we all gear up for next year's students.

Yours sincerely

Martin Blakey
Chief Executive