Description
This workshop will focus upon assisting business case development for Towns Fund skills infrastructure related projects and digital hubs. It will provide observations and insight to ensure projects consider the dependencies for success as well as facilitate intra-town discussions. We aim to share dependencies for successful skills related projects as well as further, vocational and higher education priorities to ensure alignment with government policies and approaches.
We will explore ‘digital hubs’ and the challenges identified through the University Town Working Group, namely in ensuring access to investment for start/scale up businesses within new hub spaces, best practice examples (with guest speakers) to help projects develop their plans and a logic framework to define digital hub success.
We are keen that Towns benefit from other Towns successes and from collaborative problem solving (based upon similar project themes and challenges).
Skills infrastructure projects relate to the following project types:
Further, higher education campus expansion/creation
Sector hubs
Advanced hubs
Incubators
Career guidance
Working spaces for businesses in start and scale up phases
Other
Please note that this workshop will be limited to 12 places. We may therefore only be able to offer one place per Town, dependent on the level of interest.
About the speakers
Richard Hadfield has worked with colleges, universities, DfE and other government education and research agencies for over 15 years. He has been involved in policy initiatives as well as institutional projects. He’s worked with a number of towns to assist their TIP development and has received very positive feedback for his structured advice.
Tom Bridges is an experienced professional in town and city strategies, urban and regional policy and planning, transport, economic development, economic analysis, regeneration, and town and city operations.
Isobel Vernon-Avery is a consultant at Arup. She specialises in developing people-centred digital strategies for towns, cities and developments. She works across the built environment to facilitate the transition to a circular economy and to support places in realising its value.