Next week Alex and I head to Nottingham to attend the The Institute of Development Professionals in Education (IDPE) conference being held at the East Midlands Conference Centre. IDPE was established over 20 years ago with a vision to enable all schools in the independent and state sectors to develop cultures of community engagement and philanthropic support so that they can provide the best educational experience for children and young people.
It’s the first time EFC has attended the conference and we’re looking forward to meeting new colleagues across the sector and collecting fresh ideas and insights. With a variety of session types, we’re particularly interested in Horizon and the roundtable discussions.
Horizon explores emerging trends across the school/fundraising sectors. This interests us as we’re at the conference to learn and understand the schools context. It’s expected that with a general election looming and Labour predicted to win, charitable status will be removed for schools. This will have a serious impact on the finance and fundraising landscape in schools, so it will be helpful to have constructive conversations around this.
The roundtable discussions offer a chance to have focussed conversations with supporting organisations meaning we’ll get to discuss issues in detail with school teams. Specific sessions we’ll be attending are ‘Growing philanthropy in schools - what can we do differently?’ as it’s always advantageous to learn more about the sector. We understand technology at EFC so ‘How to maximise engagement using advancement technology’ will also be a great discussion, enabling us to learn more about how it’s being used in schools.
We look forward to meeting our peers and engaging in some thought-provoking conversations.