Quality Committee Co-optee - Volunteer in Birmingham

You’ll have a manageable chance to contribute to outcomes for our 600 disabled learners, supported living adults and community users through four virtual meetings annually. Ideal if you have care or education expertise.

The ultimate beneficiaries of your co‑optee role on our Services Committee will be our students and clients, who need the quality of what we do to be the best. To help us strive for improvement, you will help us by applying your keen eye for whether objectives and targets are ‘SMART’ and cover all the right issues. Having helped to ensure that success with our improvement plans can be measured, during meetings you’ll be adding insight to the work of the team, motivating the staff on whom we rely by recognising what’s working well and using your expertise to identify when to challenge what’s not working as well or not progressing as quickly as it should.

What are we looking for?

• Care or education expertise.

For this role, you must have the expertise necessary to help the committee ensure that objectives and targets are ‘SMART’ and then help it scrutinise our performance against these and against external expectations, such as those set by the Care Quality Commission and Ofsted. All applications are welcome but, right now, we most need to bolster care and education representation.

What will you be doing?

This committee has oversight of the quality of teaching, learning and outcomes in our further education college, in our student accommodation, in our supported living accommodation and in our community services. That’s already an important responsibility, but it’s one that’s getting bigger. Work will soon start on our new therapies suite, to be followed by a new teaching block that will take us from 450 to 700 students. In our effort to keep up with demand, we’re also embarking on expansion of our non‑college and trading services.

As a co‑optee, you’ll be welcomed into, and supported within, a dedicated team that scrutinises managers’ written reports about the quality of what we offer (such as the Self‑Assessment Report and Quality Improvement Plan), as well as reports from trustee visits about students’ and clients’ experience on the ground. To be effective, you’ll need to be willing to challenge, as well as to recognise what’s good. While we’re a polite bunch, the team needs to benefit from what you offer us, so you will need to be willing to put yourself forward during meetings. And, of course, you’ll need to have the time, and the ability, to read pre‑meeting papers and plans that are sent seven days in advance.

We are advertising for trustees alongside this advert, but not everyone can commit the time needed for that. In comparison, co‑option to our Services Committee only requires attendance at four virtual meetings each year and online safeguarding training. This could be your manageable way to contribute your care or education expertise to what we do. Your focus will be on whether the quality of what we do is meeting expectations across our services, but you don’t need to be an expert in all of these and, where you’re not, we think this is a great way to broaden your experience.