Strategy
Our Group’s Strategic Plan runs until the end of the 2024 – 2025 Academic Year, and is anchored by our commitment to inclusivity and the communities we serve. The Group’s Mission is clearly linked to our localities, and commits us to playing a leading role for East Kent in developing the economic and social prosperity of the diverse communities we serve.
Our Group’s Strategic Plan is underpinned by five overarching goals.
Create a revolutionary model of education, delivering a new range of nationally recognised education solutions for the benefit of East Kent and beyond.
Deliver inspirational, inclusive and purposeful education that enables young people and adults to achieve their ambitions and meet the needs of east Kent.
Successfully integrate Ashford College and Spring Lane into the EKC Group family, developing the provision to enable the Group to truly meet the needs of the whole of East Kent
Continue to invest in industry-standard facilities and first class Group services that support our business units to deliver aspirational, relevant and high quality learning experiences.
Ensure that EKC Group is an employer of choice and responds appropriately to the social, ethical and moral issues of its communities, supporting the development of well-rounded and responsible young people.
You can view the group’s strategic plan here:
We are now working to develop our new Strategic Plan which will run between 2025 and 2029.
You can view our current draft Strategic Goals and Objectives below
Our Group
Having grown from a single site at Broadstairs, East Kent Colleges Group now spans the whole of the East Kent area. We are a family of six unique community colleges, alongside our regional business unit EKC Training.
As a Group we now employ some 1,500 people, contributing a huge amount to the local economy and delivering clear positive impacts across our sites. The organisation turns over some £70m annually and is now one of the largest Further Education colleges groups in the UK.
Culture
Our culture is one of collaboration and community. We’re strong believers in putting community first, with our Colleges and Business Units working in partnership to deliver the transformation their locality wants and needs.
We want colleagues to be able to be ensure their roles fits into their lives seamlessly and actively encourage and empower staff to adopt flexible working approaches.
Our Group is passionate about behaving responsibility towards the environment and take our commitment to carbon neutrality seriously. Alongside a range of initiatives to cut down on our footprint, we’re active in leading this agenda within the communities we serve, advocating on the climate emergency and promoting this work to our corporate partners. We care because there’s only one planet and we have to focus our efforts on ensuring it’s safeguarded for everyone’s future. We were recently highly commended for this work at the sector leading Association of Colleges Beacon Awards and regularly achieve other awards for our work to deliver a more sustainable College Group.
We’re proud that our staff body is representative of the diverse communities we serve, and we’ve been champions of driving social action within them, helping to deliver positive changes across them. We are committed to equal opportunities and celebrate the diversity of staff and students.
As users of the disability confident scheme, we guarantee to interview all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for a vacancy and are proud to offer a working environment that gives opportunities to all.
As part of our core belief in ESG we also commit ourselves to empowering staff to take time out to deliver social actions that will make a positive impact on their community. This gives colleagues the opportunity to live our corporate values and do something wonderful for those around them. We do this through our ‘My 10 Days’ initiative.
The Group’s values are centred around the word ‘CAREER’. Find out more about who we are and the values we live within our Group in this graphic.
Ofsted
As a General Further Education (GFE) provider East Kent Colleges Group was utterly unique when it achieved its Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ judgement. It was the first College to have received ‘Outstanding’ gradings in every single strand of the new Enhanced Inspection Framework.
The categories we achieved ‘Outstanding’ in are: The Quality of Education, Behaviour and Attitudes, Personal Development, Leadership and Management, Education Programmes for Young People, Adult Learning Programmes, Apprenticeships, Provision for Learners with High Needs.
As a Group we also achieved a ‘Strong’ skills judgement in the inspection, underscoring the massive effort we put into ensuring the skills we teach our learners are the right ones for local employers.
You can view the Group’s full Ofsted report here: