I don’t know about you, but one of the first things I do in the morning is check my social feeds. I like to see what’s going on in the world, but I don’t want to go searching for it, I expect it all to be there on my feed, waiting for me.

That’s the world we live in; information is easier to access than ever, but there’s so much of it that we sometimes need help knowing where to look. That’s why we spend time collating our favourite sites, our favourite people and our favourite content into one space. And that’s what we wanted to create for NCG.

We may be seven separate colleges, but we’re one community working together to achieve our shared mission of ‘enabling social mobility and economic prosperity through exceptional education’ across the length and breadth of the country.

We have tens of thousands of students studying with us across our seven colleges and every day there are stories to celebrate and share. Thanks to technology, and like most organisations we’ve become more connected and collaborative than ever over the past two years, which is helping us to see how our national reach is having a real impact on our local communities and on a national scale.

We’ve always known that there are amazing things happening locally within our colleges, but these new dedicated spaces help us to share that with our valued learners, colleagues and stakeholders so that they don’t have to go hunting for it. Recently we’ve shared a story about our Executive Director of Quality, Steve Wallis contributing to a national report on the future of Level 3 qualifications as well as content about our Southwark College Business students becoming Grand Champions in the Schools and Colleges category at The Natwest Big Idea Challenge 2022 and a story about Newcastle College University Centre investing in a new training aircraft following a £2m investment.

It’s a simple tool and a simple idea – but by collating everything into one feed you can see an instant snapshot of what’s going on across the whole organisation. Internally, it allows us to easily share stories from one part of the organisation with colleagues right across the Group to showcase successes and best practice and reinforce that they’re an important part of something much bigger. Understanding that bigger picture, the direction that we’re travelling in together and how their role contributes encourages colleagues to engage with and collaborate with each other. 

Externally, we want to show how we are achieving our vision to be the UK’s leading college group, recognised for our local impact, national influence and reach. These dedicated sites really help us to harness that, whether we’re sharing content and work from our learners, an NCG-wide project or campaign that’s taking place in each of our colleges, or the success of a partnership with an employer local to just one college, we can easily see the results and benefits of being part of a national group that works to enact local impact on a national scale.

Our next exciting step in our digital development is the launch of our new website in the summer which again offers a content rich experience showcasing the best and impact of NCG.

Visit NCG Students for the latest from our student community and NCG Creating Impact for a roundup of our sector engagement activity.