Overview
Coventry City Council have co-created a training package with Birmingham City Council that seeks to raise awareness of modern slavery, enable staff to better spot the signs, and increase confidence in reporting and responding to modern slavery when potential cases are encountered. The training will aim to address modern slavery and exploitation in a consistent and comprehensive manner across our cities.
The package consists of three levels of training (basic, intermediate, and advanced) which will equip all council staff to identify and respond to modern slavery to the level required within their roles and responsibilities.
This will be the first council-wide modern slavery training package developed and implemented in Coventry City Council. Our aspiration is that this training package will lead to the upskilling of staff and therefore an improved council-wide response to modern slavery.
Partnership working
Led by the Modern Slavery Leads in Community Safety in each council, colleagues within CCC and BCC have co-written the training package. This has resulted in the creation of standardised content which is applicable in either Local Authority. Coventry’s local context and pathways will be added to make the training locally relevant. We hope that our collaboration with Birmingham City Council will act as a reproducible model for partnership working for local authorities across the UK.
For levels two and three, we have included a series of short-form videos from valued partner agencies illustrating case studies of modern slavery. These videos will be played in our live training sessions and will give practical examples of the reality of modern slavery, as well as an understanding of the various agencies involved in tackling modern slavery in our region. Partners include West Midlands Police, West Midlands.