Day: September 8, 2015

Last chance to get your full-time place at Edinburgh College

EdColl

Edinburgh College has last-minute places still available on a range of full-time courses across its curriculum until the application deadline this Friday (11th  September). 

Spaces are also available on a part-time, evening and leisure courses aimed at boosting and expanding professional skills or learning a new hobby.

The college’s courses offer routes to employment and further studies in specialities from hair and beauty and dance to childcare, science, construction, events management and engineering.

The college has full-time places across its curriculum:

  • Community-based programmes including Entry to Learning and Preparation for Employment
  • Creative Industries courses including dance, musical theatre, music and computing subjects including HND Computer Games Development
  • Engineering programmes including electrical, manufacture, fabrication and welding, and the college’s BEng Energy and Environmental Engineering, delivered with Edinburgh Napier University
  • Science courses including Scottish Wider Access Programme (SWAP) courses to prepare students for university study, and NC Higher Applied Science courses to develop practical laboratory skills
  • Health, Wellbeing and Social Sciences courses including early education and childcare, and courses to prepare students for Higher studies
  • Construction HND courses in construction management and architectural technology
  • Hair and Beauty therapy
  • Events management

Students get access to industry-standard resources, from specialist engineering facilities including renewable and sustainable technology to our arts rehearsal and performance spaces and theatres, and our hair and beauty salons.

The college’s Creative Industries Department is also holding a clearing day to provide more information on courses available for application. This will take place on Sighthill Campus (for Broadcast Media & Photography, Computing, Music & Sound Production) and Granton Campus (for Performing Arts and Art & Design) on Thursday 10 September, 1.30-6pm.

Part-time, evening and leisure courses are also available across the curriculum, including: languages; National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher; Engineering, including occupational health and safety; Business and finance including accounting, marketing, management and admin; creative courses in photography, art portfolio and computing; courses in hygiene and food standards; counselling and social care and medical and pharmacy courses.

For more information on the full-time courses with spaces, visit www.edinburghcollege.ac.uk/august15.

For part-time courses, visit www.edinburghcollege.ac.uk/august2015/pt.aspx

Forty years old but no slowing down: happy birthday, PoLHA!

POLHA 40 Low Res-1

Port of Leith Housing Association (PoLHA) marked its 40th anniversary with a celebration at Hibs’ Easter Road stadium last week. The event was attended by 150 guests including staff, tenants, partners and contractors. 

Established in 1975, the Association has invested over £200m creating over 2,700 good quality affordable homes in the Leith and North Edinburgh areas, and the Association has also assisted over 500 young people into further training and work since the launch of it’s TOiL project in 2005.

To mark this impressive milestone, a “This Is Your Life” style production entertained the guests. This featured old stills of Leith and PoLHA along with a short film highlighting the impact the Association makes on the lives of residents and the community.

On a night to remember there was also an audio featuring Douglas McKay, the very first Chair of the Association, and current Chair Margaret O’ Connor and her predecessor Jack Hunter also took part in live interviews.

Keith Anderson, Chief Executive, said: “As one of Edinburgh’s oldest local housing associations to have reached this milestone is a great achievement.

“Our beliefs are still very much what they were 40 years in that we are committed to building even more high quality affordable homes for people in Leith and North Edinburgh.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported us over the years. Working together we are better able to deliver our ambition which is to make places great for people to live in and to change lives for the better in future.”

A life on the ocean wave for Craigie crew!

Craigroyston kids sail the Clyde thanks to CashBack for Communities and Ocean Youth Trust Scotland 

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Eight young people from Edinburgh were given the opportunity to take part in an Ocean Youth Trust Scotland voyage funded with money from CashBack for Communities last week. The group set sail from Greenock on 31 August to spend five days exploring the waters of the Upper Clyde.

The group was made up of young people from Craigroyston Community High School and Castlebrae Community High School.

The Craigroyston group was particularly looking forward to their voyage – three of them recently completed the build of their coastal rowing skiff with Muirhouse Youth Development Group!

Whilst on board, the group found themselves fully responsible for sailing the 72ft yacht, Alba Explorer, including all the elements of day to day life on board the yacht from cleaning and cooking to hoisting and dropping sails on the foredeck.

Speaking to a very excited group at the end of the voyage, this is what they had to say:

“This trip will change lots of people’s lives, especially the people who thought they had nothing after school.”

“An enriched week full of beautiful moments and memories. Life changing and unforgettable.”

“I learned something new every day.”

“I learned so many things, some great ideas we can use with our skiff and confidence in myself and in meeting new people.”

alba volunteer

Richard Haig, OYTS First Mate on board said, “It was amazing to see the change in the young people from the start of the week to the end. One of the girls in particular was so quiet at the start of the week. But, by the end I watched her grab a full sail bag from the pontoon and throw it over the guard rail onto the deck saying: “I’m stronger than I look!” – a real show of the confidence she had gained over the week!”

All members of the crew received the Royal Yachting Association’s Start Yachting Level 1 Award, the SQA’s Level 3 Speaking and Listening qualification.  All of the young people have also put themselves forward to be Ocean Youth Trust Scotland volunteers and have asked to be put forward for OYT’s Young Leaders Development Programme.

Ocean Youth Trust Scotland (OYT Scotland), Scotland’s leading sail training organisation, is transforming more than 320 young people’s lives over two years thanks to an award from the “CashBack for Communities” scheme – the Scottish Government’s proceeds of crime fund.

Participants from disadvantaged backgrounds across Scotland will take part in five-day long sea voyages in some of the world’s best sailing waters. During the voyage, the novice sailors gain nationally accredited qualifications, and also improve their communication and problem-solving skills.

Nick Fleming, Chief Executive of OYT Scotland said: “Our voyages offer young people a truly unique and life changing opportunity. Over the course of a very intense week, living together in close proximity, they not only learn to sail, they learn leadership skills and how to work effectively as a team.

“This group have been a clear example of all that this programme aims to achieve in every participant.  Our sea-staff, comprising both professionals and volunteers, understand how to get the best from each individual. This results in young people often being able to achieve things they never imagined they were capable of and changing their outlook on what the future could hold”.

Justice Secretary Michael Matheson said: “Investing in our young people is always money well spent and I am delighted that the Scottish Government’s Cashback for Communities programme is providing this valuable funding for worthy projects across Scotland.

“This Government is committed to ensuring young people reach their full potential. The vast majority of them are a credit to society but we want to prevent the small minority getting involved in crime or antisocial behaviour in the first place.

“Scotland’s unique CashBack for Communities programme invests monies seized from criminals back into our communities. Since 2008, we’ve committed £75 million community initiatives right across the country, improving lives and helping Scotland prosper.”

Over the past fifty years, Greenock-based OYT Scotland has grown to become one of the leading sail training charities in the world. With two sail training vessels, Alba Explorer and Alba Venturer, OYT Scotland completed 57 voyages with 569 young people in 2014.

For more information about OYT Scotland go to www.oytscotland.org.uk

For more information on the Scottish Government’s CashBack for Communities scheme go to www.cashbackforcommunities.org

Helping the helpless: local collection points for humanitarian aid

Edinburgh Direct Aid supporting Syrian refugees

syria children

Newhaven -based charity Edinburgh Direct Aid (EDA) is supporting international efforts to give aid to the tens of thousands of desperate people who have been forced to flee their homes, run for their lives and risk the safety of their families.

We can help by providing much-needed supplies – we can all help to make a difference.

The public response has already been tremendous, but the following items are urgently needed:

underwear (new!)
toothpaste
toothbrushes
soap
detergent
toilet paper
nappies
sanitary towels
wipes

And equipment needed for education and vocational training:

notebooks

A4 paper

pens/pencils

boardwriters

sewing materials

wool’

WHERE TO DONATE:

GRANTON MUIRHOUSE and WEST PILTON

The EDA warehouse is located behind a wire-grid gate on the south side of West Harbour Road – just past the TEBA boxing studio and opposite Len Lothian. It’s now open on Tuesdays and Saturdays from 11am – 3pm.

It is usually possible to park in the road outside, or to bring a car inside the gate but manoeuvring inside the yard can be awkward.

For further information contact Ian on 0785 785 5849

If it’s more convenient, you can make your donations in Muirhouse or West Pilton – both Muirhouse Community Shop on Pennywell Road (Monday to Friday 9am -3pm) and Pilton Youth & Childrens Project (PYCP) (telephone 332 9815) are also collection points for the Edinburgh Direct Aid appeal.

Please give what you can

‘It can happen again’: the danger of intolerance

‘We cannot lack the courage to stand up, together, and say that we will not tolerate intolerance’ – Business Secretary Sajid Javid MP

Auschwitz

Last night Business Secretary Sajid Javid addressed the Holocaust Educational Trust annual dinner about the dangers of letting intolerance go unchecked:

 

“It happened, therefore it can happen again.”

Primo Levi’s words capture with an almost beautiful simplicity the central lesson of the Shoah … so much so that they are carved into the subterranean walls of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Yet today, more than 70 years since the liberation of the death camps, both the Holocaust and Levi’s warning are slipping to the fringes of living memory.

Now more than ever we cannot allow that to happen. Because in 2015 history is beginning to repeat itself. Across Europe, anti-Semitism is on the rise.

It’s easy to dismiss.

To see ‘liars’ painted across an advert for a Holocaust Memorial event, and say it’s just petty vandalism.

Or to hear Dutch football fans chanting “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” and say it’s just a few bad apples.

Or to see a Rabbi being chased through Gateshead by a gang and say it’s an isolated incident.

To do so ignores the grim reality.

In the past three years Jewish schools, shops, museums and places of worship have been attacked by gunmen in Toulouse, in Paris, in Brussels and in Copenhagen. In civilised Western Europe, in the 21st century, Jews are once again being murdered simply for being Jews.

But mass murder is not the beginning of the process. It never is. The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Indiscriminate killing is simply where hatred, left unchecked, reaches its tragic conclusion.

The Holocaust began with nothing more than words. Then came the insults, boycotts, discrimination.

The noxious weed of anti-Semitism crept insidiously into everyday life: degrading, denouncing and dehumanising its victims until the stage was set for violence, oppression and finally murder on a scale unprecedented before or since.

That steady escalation meant that the 6 million individuals who died were not the only victims of the Holocaust. Countless more were forced from their homes, abandoning everything they owned, often leaving family members behind as they desperately sought a friendly harbour in desperately unfriendly times. Many found that harbour in Britain.

For that we have to thank people like Sir Nicholas Winton.

In 1939, as darkness descended across Europe, he organised the rescue of 669 Czech children as part of the Kindertransport. Today, there are literally thousands of people – the children and their descendants – who can say they owe their lives to him. Sir Nicholas died earlier this year at the age of 106.

But his daughter Barbara is here this evening, along with two of the children he brought to the UK. Barbara, I know your father was a reluctant hero. But a hero he truly was. He deserves our eternal gratitude.

Anyone who fled murderous extremism 75 years ago will find the refugee crisis we face today depressingly familiar. Despite what some say, ISIL are not the Nazis. What we’re seeing in Syria is not genocide or a Holocaust.

But when we see armed police herd refugees onto a train, telling them they’re heading for a new life when in fact they’re on their way to a detention camp, when we see the shutters come down and the ‘we’re full’ signs go up, it’s a chilling reminder of what happens when we forget the recent past.

Of the lack of empathy, education and awareness of history that allows such scenes to unfold in modern Europe.

Of how easily and quickly we forget what went before.

A migrant leaves their home in search of a better one. A refugee has no home to go to.

And it is incumbent upon those of us who are more fortunate to offer such men, women and children the safe haven they desperately need and they truly deserve.

If we look the other way, if we say it’s nothing to do with us, if we say a refugee’s not welcome here because of his or her religion … well, then we are no better than those who tried to bar the door against Jewish refugees two generations ago and we have failed to learn the lesson that Levi so clearly set out.

That it happened, and therefore it can happen again.”

 

 

 

 

‘A country of extraordinary compassion’: UK to welcome up to 20,000 refugees

‘this is a country of extraordinary compassion, always standing up for our values and helping those in need.’ – Prime Minister David Cameron

shoe

The Scottish Government has welcomed Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement that Great Britain is to give refuge to up 20,000  Syrian people and has offered to work with Westminster to tackle the humanitarian crisis.

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, the Prime Minister said: “Britain already works with the UN to deliver resettlement programmes and we will accept thousands more under these existing schemes. We have already provided sanctuary to more than 5,000 Syrians in Britain and have introduced a specific resettlement scheme, alongside those we already have, to help those Syrian refugees particularly at risk.

“But given the scale of the crisis and the suffering of the Syrian people it is right that we should do much more. So Mr Speaker, we are proposing that Britain should resettle up to 20,000 Syrian refugees over the rest of this Parliament.

“In doing so we will continue to show the world that this is a country of extraordinary compassion always standing up for our values and helping those in need.”

The Scottish Government has repeatedly called on the UK Government to play a part in a co-ordinated European response to this emergency humanitarian issue and has pledged to take a fair and proportionate share of refugees in Scotland.

Responding to the Prime Minister’s announcement,  Scotland’s Minister for Europe and International Development Humza Yousaf  said:

“As made clear by the First Minister at last week’s emergency humanitarian summit, Scotland is willing to take our fair share of refugees to help some of the most vulnerable people in need.

“We welcome the Prime Minister’s shift in attitude and late recognition that the UK has a role to play as an important first step. The 20,000 refugees over five years should not be seen as a cap or an upper limit and we must also play our part in responding to the crisis on the southern European coast line.

“We believe that the UK Should opt in to the EU relocation scheme and while the Prime Minister has made clear that the year one resettlement will be funded from the UK international aid budget, we seek urgent clarification on the impact that this will have on the work of existing aid projects.

“The refugee situation is at crisis point now and stretching UK support and refugee intake over the next five years means a number of people who could be helped immediately will be left without the vital help they need.

“We want to work constructively with the UK Government and the First Minister has again, today, written to the Prime Minster outlining the proceedings of Friday’s summit which focused on looking at some of the practical issues involved in integrating those who come here to seek protection.

“Today, I met with the Scottish Refugee Council to discuss the immediate service provision required to take in refugees and tomorrow I will chair the first meeting of the taskforce which will bring together stakeholders from across Scotland in the areas of local government, housing, health services, language support, transport and social services and will co-ordinate Scotland’s humanitarian and practical response.

“This is first and foremost a humanitarian crisis and it requires a humanitarian response. The overwhelming support we have seen from the Scottish people over the past few days shows our willingness to help the most vulnerable in the world.”

All change! Community health set for shakeup

‘People will see a better service and be able to be treated in the local community’ – First Minister Nicola Sturgeon 

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The role of general practice in our health service is set for a significant shakeup, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced during a visit to Wester Hailes yesterday.

Over the next two years, ten health centres across the country will form ‘community care teams’ and test different ways of delivering healthcare including:

  • Local surgeries working together for faster appointments
  • GPs and health professionals – such as physiotherapists – working together in multidisciplinary teams so that patients see the right professional quickly
  • Local centres providing treatments which patients currently have to travel to hospital to receive – including short stay in-patient beds for assessment and treatment.

Two of the test sites will trial a new type of doctor to head up the multidisciplinary teams – and a small number of GPs will have the opportunity to receive an additional year of training to give them the skills to take on the new role and work across primary and acute care. Nurses and other health professionals will also have the chance to develop new skills as part of the plans.

The First Minister Nicola Sturgeon met with patients and GPs at Wester Hailes Health Centre which is part of a group of seven GPs across Edinburgh working together. They have also linked up with other healthcare providers to work more closely with the local community and tackle the underlying causes of health inequality – such as substance abuse, mental health issues, employability and social isolation.

Ms Sturgeon said: “People deserve the very best treatment at the right time and in the right place – and that’s as close to home as possible.

“We have already taken steps to integrate health and social care and now transforming our GP services and local health centres is the next step. That means you will see the professional who can best help you and, in some cases, your local GP will soon offer the type of treatments that previously only hospitals could deliver.

“I can confirm that ten test sites will run over the next two years so we can see the most effective way to introduce these new ways of delivering community based healthcare across Scotland.

“Nobody wants to go into hospital if they don’t have to and with these new plans, people will see a better service and be able to be treated in the local community.

“This is good for patients and good for the NHS – GPs in particular will see their role develop in a significant way.”

The ten sites – in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife, Tayside, Forth Valley, Campbeltown, West Lochaber, Islay, Mid-Argyll and Clackmannanshire – will share aims that are based on some simple principles:

  • To deliver as much care as possible at or close to home.
  • To ensure that care is delivered by the individual or team with the most appropriate skills, helping individuals plan for their care.
  • To ensure that people are only admitted to hospital when they are in real need of hospital treatment.
  • To ensure that when someone is admitted to hospital their journey out of hospital is planned and straightforward.