Expressions of Interest are invited from any organisation that is working to support improved access to and success in, learning and skills for people who experience mental health difficulties by working in partnership with others. It is hoped that 9 partner organisations will be recruited for the reading for pleasure project to run in health and social care settings – 3 in primary care settings, 3 secondary mental health care settings and 3 in care homes for the elderly.

Reading for pleasure can be a valuable tool in engaging and motivating adults to take part in informal learning opportunities. This project is concerned with the development of service-user led reading groups, and the potential benefits that involvement in the groups can provide to service-user confidence; well-being; reading, speaking and listening skills; and engagement in wider community activities, for example library use. Each project site will be asked to support a service-user led book group for 5 or 6 sessions. Book groups will receive free copies of Quick Reads titles and £80 in book tokens to support their reading over the course of the project. NIACE will provide a range of support, negotiated with service users, to each book group from a NIACE Project Officer.

It is hoped that Expressions of Interest will be received from a range of organisations, who feel that their service users would be interested in running a book group in one of the above settings and in contributing to the wider lessons learned from the project.

Expressions of Interest could come from:

• Learning providers – FE Colleges, Work-based learning providers, Adult and Community Learning teams and other providers.
• Health and Social Care providers – Community Mental Health Teams, Early Intervention Team, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, Improving Access to Psychological Therapy Workers, Primary Care Services etc
• Voluntary Sector referral and support organisations.
• Employment Support Agencies
• Vocational Rehabilitation Services
• User-led organisations.

What you will gain from being involved:

• The opportunity to learn about and share good practice.
• The chance to reflect upon your own practice in supporting people with mental health difficulties to access and succeed in learning and skills.
• To develop ideas for improving the services you offer and your provision.
• Hear about resources and training that is available to support your work.

If you are interested in being involved, the following criteria may be useful to consider.

• You need to be able to commit to working to a tight time-scale as progress needs to be reported by March 2010.
• You need to have the capacity and willingness to get the project under way quickly.
• Willingness for involvement in the project at a strategic and operational level within your organisation.
• Participation in pilot site meetings (face-to-face or virtual) and on-going communication with project staff.
• Prepared to have an input into data collection, monitoring and evaluation.

To register your interest, please contact Rachel Davies (rachel.davies@niace.org.uk Tel: 011...)
stating why you are interested in the project, what expertise you think you can offer, but more importantly, what you hope to gain. All Expressions of Interest to be received by July 27th 2009.

When pilot sites to participate in each project have been selected details of the projects and pilot sites will be posted on the web. You may also be interested in looking at NIACE’s previous work on reading for pleasure at www.readingforpleasure.org.uk.

If you require further information please contact Rachel Davies (rachel.davies@niace.org.uk Tel: 0116 204 6989)