Virtual College’s work with Home Office wins gold at TJ Awards

Virtual College has been awarded gold for Best Training Partnership at the TJ Awards 2017 for their work on FGM awareness training with the Home Office.

The TJ Awards, now in their 12th year, recognise the ingenuity, creativity, passion and hard work of learning and development professionals from around the world. This year the awards ceremony took place at the Brewery in London on Tuesday 5th December.

Following shortlisting and an intense interview process, Virtual College and the Home Office beat off entries from major companies such as Jaguar Land Rover and Sky.

The Home Office and Virtual College partnered to create a free online course to raise awareness of and help prevent female genital mutilation (FGM), focusing on the experiences of Hope, a fictional young girl whose life reflects those of the 125,000 women at risk of FGM in the UK.

The Home Office set four clear objectives for the e-learning: to raise awareness of FGM and its four types; to educate learners about the indicators of ‘at risk’ women; to make the law on FGM in the UK clear and to communicate the importance of a multi-agency approach to prevention.

The course has achieved phenomenal results so far. As of July 2017, awareness of FGM had already been raised significantly with 128,000 learners completing the course.

In the immediate post-course survey:

98% would recommend the course to others.
Nearly 84% would feel quite or very confident when confronted with an incident of FGM.

Alison Humphreys, the Home Office FGM Policy Lead at the time of course release, said: “Virtual College’s passion for the project and their understanding of the sensitivity of the subject, together with their experience of developing products for our target audience, meant that the end product was innovative and tailored to the needs of the learners.”

Recognition of Virtual College at these prestigious awards follows their success at last week’s global Learning Technologies Awards 2017 where Virtual College collected two awards.