The provision of training courses and the development of a branding and marketing campaign to create the Waterways College concept in Graiguenamangh, County Kilkenny

Tender description

The provision of a range of services- training/ education, branding, marketing and supporting capital items to facilitate the creation of the Waterways College in Graiguenamanagh, County Kilkenny. The services are separated into 5 lots and would together allow the Waterways College (WC) to realise to establish itself its ambition to be a unique training/ education facility providing a range of courses at various levels of the QQI spectrum and outside it and to become a niche supplier of learning for trainees/ students from a range of educational backgrounds to avail of those courses. The Waterways College concept seeks to provide a range of courses across a spectrum of activities and grades- QQI certified vocational, uncertified personal development and social recreational- all linked to rivers and waterways generally-and to the River Barrow in particular. The key unifying element of the concept is the connection to the skills acquisition and learning linked to waterways- rivers, canals, stream, wetlands. The curriculum development lot would seek to optimise the course curriculum in terms of the attractiveness of the offering to the range of people targeted. The prospectus would potentially be established by a mix of courses currently available from existing providers (e.g. ETB) hosted in the Outdoor Hub facility in Graiguenamanagh and of newly developed bespoke training courses that will help create the Waterways College concept. In terms of ETB and state training bodies, the lot will require research on the willingness and conditions on basing courses in the WC. The Pilot Course lot will largely focus on funding an introductory programme for those bespoke courses and for other courses that are not funded by the state, The branding and marketing lots would require an iterative approach of working with the stakeholders to develop a suitable image and approach. The capital items will allow the delivery of course work and the fitting out of the training base.