“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
However, for education to work it has to be industry ready and it has to be specific to the needs of industry today and that’s exactly why we undertake Chunking seminars.
Pedagogy today has substantially changed and this explains the success of Fashion-Enter and our growing academies and streams. The educational division of the company began with Stitching Academy, which launched in July 2013 with funding from ASOS.com, Haringey Council and Jobcentre Plus. ASOS.com have long supported Fashion-Enter’s initiatives including the development of The Factory, which now produces up to 10,000 garments per week and the highly successful apprenticeship programme, which works with well-known UK brands and retailers.
With a growing skills gap in the UK fashion manufacturing sector Fashion Enter expanded its learning facility in April 2015 to include the Fashion Technology Academy (FTA). Situated alongside the Factory in Haringey, the FTA offers qualifications across the entire garment life cycle incorporating pattern making, fabric inspection, laying and cutting, quality control, machine maintenance and stitching.
This was followed by a bid to develop a state of the art Tailoring Academy and thanks to ‘The Good Growth Fund’, Mayor Sadiq Khan’s new £70 million regeneration programme to support growth and community development in London and the London Borough of Haringey Council, London’s first Tailoring Academy opened its doors at the end of 2019.
Chunking seminar with various department heads
This growth has occurred because we train our learners to be ready with industry skills and for this to work we have to use Chunking!
Chunking is joining up the various areas learning so the different chunks, or jigsaw pieces if you like, of a garment life cycle are explained by our industry experts and the learner is assessed on the knowledge that has been gained. We want our learners to have engrained knowledge…knowledge that is automatically recalled so the learner is “unconsciously competent”.
Fashion-Enter CEO Jenny Holloway comments: “We can not take the credit for these Chunking seminars. I went to an Ofsted presentation with our Operations Manager Esme and they actually came up with the idea – we just thought what a great idea! We undertake these seminars every six-months and keep pressing the importance of industry standards, ethics and compliance – areas which very much change on a regular basis.”
In the latest Chunking Seminar, held on 16th January 2020, with our current cohort of Level 3 & 4 apprentices, each department head explained their job and engaged with the learners with a series of statements, scenario settings and deliberately incorrect statements regarding the garment manufacturing industry. It’s a memorable way of learning across the fashion production industry alongside course specifics.
Feedback from our Chunking seminars has been excellent it is clear that they really do work.