Our aim is to make the courses covered in this handbook as flexible and user-friendly as possible.
There are obviously costs involved in putting on such courses, such as the production of these handbooks and administration costs. However, we intend to keep such costs to an absolute minimum. For this first year, all of those overhead costs will come directly out of the Adult Formation budget. The only cost to you will be the fees for the speakers themselves.
Cost
The suggested cost for each course is £30 per session. Of that, £20 is given to the speaker as an honorarium, and £10 is offered to the speaker towards the cost of travel. This £30 is the total cost of each separate session – whether 50 people or just 5 turn up. (This is the cost for the total session, not per person!!) So a course consisting of 4 sessions would cost a total of £120. This is paid directly by the parish (or group which books the course) to the Adult Formation Department. We then pass on that money to the speaker.
Some parishes might decide to pay for the session completely out of parish funds. Others may wish to have an admission charge for each person who comes to the talk. Or you might opt for a mixture of both – a small admission charge, the rest subsidised by the parish. That is completely at the discretion of the parish priest. One way of minimizing costs is for two or more parishes to club together to book a course.
Flexible Courses
Most of the “courses” consist of sessions (one, two or four) which last about 2 hours each. So speakers could be booked for an evening, an afternoon or a morning slot according to your preference and their availability. However, we do also offer some day-long courses, or courses which require special materials. The cost of these courses may vary according to the numbers of people who will be participating. So when booking such day-long courses, the cost will need to be agreed with the speaker(s).
Venues
Our aim is to make these courses as accessible as we possibly can. Our hope is that they will be taken up by parishes and groups throughout the whole diocese. The reason we are able to offer these courses so cheaply – apart from the generosity of our speakers – is because it will be up to the parish (or other booking group) to provide the venue for the courses themselves (such as a parish hall).
Evaluation
We in the Adult Formation department will be monitoring which courses are taken up by parishes and which are not. We would also like to ensure the quality of the courses provided. To that end, we will invite participants to complete a brief (anonymous) evaluation at the end of each course, to be sent to the Adult Formation Department. We would then send an evaluation of these comments to the speaker. This will help us to improve what we offer.