The value of Real Working Environments in Developing Employability.

Abstract

For some time, the School of Services Management (SSM) at Bournemouth University and many other schools, within HEIs, offering hospitality courses have been challenged to reconsider and reconfigure the skills based learning of its hospitality students. For many institutions this has been prompted by a number of drivers, not least the growing evidence that a modern university must acknowledge the demands of an increasingly diverse cohort of learners. The closure of some traditional training restaurants has also had other drivers including growing demand on resources, space and budgets particularly with the change in undergraduate funding where the band C and B weighting was reduced. Many schools have, and are, independently looking at a variety of delivery models and this article shows how the SSM has moved away from the traditional training restaurant approach and utilised a different strategy for the delivery of their practical curriculum. The team delivering the curriculum is now 48 months into the new delivery method and this article reflects on this.