We know that it can sometimes be difficult to get funding from your HEI/employer to attend a training course, especially given that some HEIs are freezing or reducing their spend on training and that some student-facing organisations - such as students' unions or chaplaincies - may already be on stretched budgets.
When a training course is very relevant to you in your student-facing role and you can free up the time to take part, we do not want the funding difficulties to prevent you from accessing training that will be useful to you.
This is why, here at Plinth House, we are starting a three-month trial of a new scheme to offer places on our live online training courses at significantly reduced rate to colleagues who are unable to secure funding from their HEI/employer to attend and unable to afford the standard cost themselves personally.
From now, and for three months, we will be holding a couple of tickets for each of our online training events (excluding our longer programmes of events, such as our 'community of practice' programmes), and these tickets will be available to self-funding colleagues at the significantly reduced rate of £5 (including VAT). To see the full list of training events we have coming up, visit our events webpage.
To request one of these places, email info@plinthhouse.com, stating the session (title and date) for which you would like to request the reduced personal rate.
If one of the reduced rate places is still available for your chosen session, we will reply (no questions asked) with a personal link to purchase your reduced rate ticket using a debit/credit card.
If the reduced rate places for your chosen session have already been allocated to others, we will reply to let you know when the session is running again or offer you a reduced rate ticket for one of our other training courses which still have reduced rate places available.
We will review the take-up of this scheme in May 2024, or when all of our reduced rate places are filled, to inform a decision about the best way in which we can support colleagues in these circumstances in the longer term.
We are also continuing to provide some of our training for free. We occasionally run free live events, which are advertised on our events webpage or to colleagues who have signed up to receive our email newsletter. We have also recently, for the first time, made one of our shorter sessions available free to watch as a recorded LinkedIn event. We will continue to review the ways in which we support colleagues to access training that will help them in their student-facing roles when they are unable to secure funding or cover the costs. We welcome suggestions or feedback on how we can best achieve this aim.
Please feel free to share a link to this information with colleagues or via social media, to help colleagues who would benefit from our new reduced rate places find out more.