Lauren Roberts, Contract Manager for delivery of NCS in Cumbria, rounds up the year before we head into the next recruitment phase for 2015.

In Cumbria we delivered 93% of the required places to be filled for Summer and Autumn 2014.  The new recruitment model used in Autumn – which worked well with some of the Colleges – helped to achieve this result.

Following this year’s Summer programme we had three young people from the County selected to participate in the NCS Leaders Programme at Dulwich College, London. The week long programme took place during October half term, with a total of 100 NCS graduates coming together from across England, Northern Ireland and Wales. The young people were given exciting opportunities, such as media training with Sky and visiting key note speakers in the Houses of Parliament.  These three young people will now act as ambassadors not only locally but nationally. Jack Todd, who has worked as a Group Leader on the programme, was also selected by the NCS Trust Graduate Manager to join them and help the Trust lead the programme.

The NCS Leaders Programme has been a fantastic way to highlight all the great work undertaken in Cumbria and NW3 as a whole.

Plans are currently being finalised for our 2015 recruitment process to ensure we recruit our full target of 864 young people across the county.

Did you know…

A proportion of the National Citizen Service income is not paid if certain criteria are not meet? Criteria include recording those who receive free school meals, young people’s social groups, ethnic origin & background. We are also penalised if a young person does not complete the programme. As the data is pulled from IYSS, it is important that IYSS is accurate and up to date at all times so that we as a company can avoid these costly penalties.