Step 0.1 on the road to inclusive access

Learning Marathon bursaries

Enrol Yourself is announcing 3 Learning Marathon bursaries, aimed at those who identify as being from an underrepresented background, including but not limited to: BAME, LGBTQ, disabled, refugee or asylum seeker.

As part of our mission to provide accessible lifelong learning experiences to adults underserved by existing offers, we hope these bursaries will help us improve the inclusivity of our programmes. We strongly believe that more diverse participation leads to greater creative potential for each peer group, and a more transformational experience for every learner.

About the bursaries

• Standard fees for the Learning Marathon are £750
• We are offering 3 x £500 bursaries
• The remaining £250 can be paid in full, over 6 monthly instalments of £42, or over 12 monthly instalments of £21
• The next London Learning Marathon starts 28/09/18
• Applications close Friday 14th September
• You can find out more about the Learning Marathon here, and for full programme dates and application form head here
• To discuss your application, your eligibility — or anything else, please contact david@enrolyourself.com

If this isn’t the opportunity for you but it’s perfect for someone you know, we’d love for you to share a link to this blog post — or share via Twitter or Linkedin.

A bit more about our intentions

Enrol Yourself exists to open up access to lifelong learning experiences, specifically to self-led learning journeys, made possible, desirable and effective through the power of peer groups.

To date we have been doing this through the Learning Marathon, our 6 month learning ‘accelerator’ where learners pool skills, networks, and resources in order to tackle professional and/or personal goals such as changing career, changing roles, setting up as self-employed, starting a small business, developing a voluntary project that can act as a calling card, or improving confidence and personal wellbeing.

When we speak about access we’re often referring to the rapidly changing world of work, the increasing pressure on adults to up-skill and re-skill alongside busy working lives, and the fact that our formal education system is in no way set up to serve people across the life course — unless you’re a millionaire bachelor with no children. Yes, there is access to all the content you could ever dream of online, but the majority of online course are books in fancy outfits. In other words, they emphasise the transmission of knowledge and ideas. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, but when it comes to providing people opportunities to meaningfully develop interpersonal skills, collaborative skills, creative problem skills and the ability to learn how to learn, these capabilities must be developed in action and application, and a half-finished MOOC is unlikely to take you there.

So we’ve been attempting to provide something that is more flexible and less costly than a Masters, but more compelling, transformational and effective than an online course of content — and we’ve been thrilled and humbled by every single applicant and every single participant that has come our way and embraced the idea of self-directed learning through the power of peer groups.

This year we have 3 programmes running concurrently in London and Birmingham, with another kicking off in London on the 28th September. So, it’s time to put words like ‘access’ under a microscope and dig deeper. Whilst mottos such as ‘whoever comes are the right people’ can be full of wisdom in some circumstances, we think that unless you take a structured, authentic and strategic approach to sharing your opportunity with lots of different people — and customising entry points so that they work for those people — then ‘whoever comes’ will be a reflection of those who came before, which is inevitably a reflection of… you.

When we considered the values upon which Enrol Yourself began, we felt that this might not be good enough.

Since our pilot group started their Learning Marathon in 2016, participants have been bringing Learning Questions to the process that explore facets of this conversation from different perspectives:

• ‘What can living with the failings in my body teach me about living with the failings in my society?’
• How can I build a space/network for black women and girls to heal and grow together?
• What does it mean to be British Asian?
• Do marginalised people evolve to interdependent styles of leadership earlier than people who are from the dominant narrative?
• How to design and support corporate cultural change towards better diversity and inclusion in the workplace?

And now, as an organisation we would like to take this further. We have begun a conversation about ‘access’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘equity’, ‘diversity’, ‘privilege’, ‘anti-oppression’ and ‘power’. All highlighted in inverted commas because of their ambiguity and multiple meanings! We are at the very beginning of a long-term journey exploring these themes. This conversation is complex and multi-faceted, but you have to start somewhere.

What next?

We are committed to continuing this conversation in the long-term, knowing that we will likely make mistakes along the way. We aim to stay open, welcome challenge, and weave what we learn into the Enrol Yourself ‘fabric’.

Bursaries are just one way to take action, and we’ve seen organisations we respect, such as Campaign Bootcamp, Maker’s Academy and SuperHi leading the way. We will also be taking some small steps, such as attending Fearless Future’s holistic approaches to diversity and inclusion workshop in a few weeks time, to learn from those with far greater experience.

Our hunch is that there is much reflective work to done ‘at home’, within ourselves, if we’re to avoid both conscious and unconscious perpetuation of systems of privilege and oppression. We’ve begun to have collective conversations within our peer groups about what ‘safer’ and ‘braver’ spaces could look and feel like, the kind of communities and organisation we want to live, work and play in, and how we might enable these.

We have an intention to create and share learning ‘playlists’ about themes we’d like to explore, including suggestions for key people doing important work in this field who we can follow on social media and beyond.

We’d love to hear about organisations you know of who are doing deep and pioneering work in these areas — give us a shout on @enrolyourself with your suggestions.

To discuss anything at all, you can reach us via hello@enrolyourself.com.

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