Warwickshire Children and Young People's Workforce

Lynne Mackaness, Deputy Director of WAYC and lead worker in the CWDC project that set up this web site is to retire at the end of October.

Already 60, Lynne had hoped to see the project through to its completion in March 2010 before retiring, but a heart attack earlier this year has caused her to bring her plans forward.

With only 5 months of the project left and most of the major milestones fulfilled, she will be handing over the work to Tammy Ballard, Training Manager at WAYC.

Lynne has been most successful at working in partnership with other organisations and the rest of the project will also be supported by Warwickshire County Council, Warwickshire Council for Voluntary Youth Services and Connexions, who have been the most involved in the project so far.

The project started with a very successful conference which pulled together all those in Coventry, Warwickshire and Solihull working on projects for CWDC. Work and training went forward to promote and implement Common Induction Standards in a variety of forms. The web site was developed and has grown during the course of the project, bringing together items of research and news of interest to the Children's and Young People's workforce.

At every stage of the project Lynne has worked with current initiatives and policy and different sectors to move things forward, supporting and promoting Artemis (e-based learning) when that project went live, assisting in the Rainbow Rollout by holding briefing workshops for the voluntary sector, and using her wide network of contacts to promote and champion the core ideas behind the project.

She has worked hard to make the project sustainable and has identified and trained volunteers to monitor and maintain the web site and to moderate the Common Induction Standards workbooks after the end of the project in March 2010.

Her last, innovative piece of work has been to devise a fifteen-session introductory course for people working with children, young people and families which should be piloted by Tammy Ballard in January. All training materials developed during the project are currently on the web site. The new course will appear once the pilot is complete.

For any queries about future work, please contact Tammy Ballard on 01926450156 or email tammy.ballard@wayc.org.uk