Youth literacy initiatives

Overview of approaches to working with young people

Young people with poor literacy skills have already experienced failure, and therefore it is vital to build literacy into activities that interest them and help them see that they can, through even small steps, improve their reading and writing skills. While there is much that teachers can do, sometimes those outside the formal education system such as volunteers or mentors, or voluntary and community groups, are better at developing relationships with young people and encouraging them to take action to improve their skills. Experience shows that the new technologies, sport and the arts are all powerful motivators which provide the 'hooks' into skills learning. For the most disaffected, offering activities at community venues can be more persuasive than school-based approaches. Local libraries often offer study support opportunities, or other approaches to motivate and enthuse young people to see learning as fun.

Working with parents is not just important in the early years. What parents say and do with their children at home as they grow into teenagers can make a big difference to students' self-image and their educational aspirations and achievement. The recent Desforges review provides a clear model on how parental involvement works, while extended schools provide an opportunity for schools to work in different ways with parents and their communities. Family learning offers opportunities for all parents, including those with few or no qualifications, to understand how they can support school learning at home through the teenage years, while addressing their own skills needs too. The Share family literacy programme has been used with some success with parents of secondary school children.

The Learning and Skills Council has a number of useful online guides to engaging young learners; visit www.lsc.gov.uk/National/Partners/SENET/Guide2/default.htm and scroll down to the "Engaging..." titles.

See also the Overview of Government approaches to working with young people.

Teenagers to be offered £25 a month to behave

Badly behaved teenagers will have professional "coaches" to help to keep them out of trouble and expensive care institutions Gordon Brown has said.
Under measures outlined by the Chancellor, youngsters are to be given "good behaviour" cards to enable them to spend up to £25 a month on sport and leisure facilities and deter them from misbehaviour.

Young people will also be given a say on how youth budgets in every local
authority area are spent and councils are to be required by legislation to ensure that youngsters have access to leisure activities, including at least two hours of sport and two hours of other "constructive" pursuits.

Mr Brown announced that £115 million is to be put into the hands of young people's groups to be spent on activities in their areas. The money will be ring-fenced and mean that an average of £500,000 will be available to most councils and £2 million to the largest. The money is additional to the £1.6 billion spent each year on youth services and opportunities. Mentoring schemes are to be established for young people in 180 secondary schools to give them advice, guidance and work experience.

The Chancellor has made youth volunteering and better services for the young one of his priorities as he continues to range outside his Treasury brief and prepares to take over from Tony Blair over the next two years. He ranks them in importance alongside his recent initiatives on Britishness and security.

(The Times, 8 March 2006)

xl factor helps disaffected students

Xl clubs, a Prince's Trust initiative, have been going since 1998 and now serve around 9,000 pupils in England in 820 clubs in 500 schools plus 70 clubs in Scotland. The clubs replace a subject on the curriculum for three lessons a week for the last two years of compulsory schooling.

The clubs are aimed at the kind of children who are at risk of underachieving at school, either because they keep getting into trouble or truanting, or because they lack confidence; the kind of children for whom the current 14-19 curriculum has not enough to offer.

The clubs are small - a maximum of 16 pupils - and are run by an adviser not a teacher. Over the two years, club members produce a folder of work to qualify for a bronze, silver or gold Asdan (award scheme development and accreditation network) award. The gold is the equivalent of a GCSE.

The programme has been praised by Ofsted inspectors as "a very effective alternative curriculum". In a survey by the Trust, 94% of young people taking part in the scheme said they wanted to go on to further education and/or training - a surprising figure given the kind of children they are.

The Prince's Trust is hoping the scheme will finally go mainstream with schools providing it themselves. Durham has already committed to putting it into all of its schools.

For further information see www.princes-trust.org.uk

(Guardian, 8 June 2004)

More than 100 of Renfrewshire's most disaffected 15-year-olds are showing that an alternative curriculum in an adult setting can transform behaviour and life chances. An initiative at Reid Kerr College in Paisley has confirmed that school is simply the wrong place for so many young people.

Only four students out of 114 have failed to complete their final year of compulsory schooling at a base in the college. Four out of 10 have gone on to a college course.
Around three-quarters have had significant learning difficulties since primary school and most have been excluded from secondary or stopped turning up after confrontations with staff or pupils.

New Directions is a "late intervention project" for students for whom schools can do nothing more. Only 30 places are available each year and 12 of the authority's 14 secondaries have taken advantage.

Students sign a contract that involves the project in devising the kind of curriculum that interests them They follow a core skills programme, backed by vocational options, personal and social development, work experience and individual support from a team of key workers.

(TESS, 13 February 2004)

Dundee has launched an innovative approach to helping young people with literacy problems. The Discovery Game is an attempt to use technology in a way that is entertaining but also has educational value according to Peter Astheimer, director of the International Centre for Computer Games and Virtual Entertainment at Abertay University, which helped develop the initiative aimed at 16-24s.

The games are very action orientated. Violence related to people has been omitted but retained if directed against objects. The developers recognize that to be motivating the games have to be appropriate for the target group.

The game will eventually be distributed to all of Scotland's learning centres and, following the evaluation, a national steering group is expected to make recommendations on the future use of computer games in literacy campaigns.

The Dundee initiative is part of the national drive to improve adult literacy and numeracy to which the Scottish Executive has committed £51 million from 2001-06.

(TESS, 31 October 2003)

The Government is likely to expand in 2003 the programme of activities intended to divert young people from crime over the summer holidays. Funding is likely to be made available throughout England for similar schemes to the lottery-funded Splash Extra, which ran in 10 high-crime areas in summer 2002. A similar programme is being expanded in Wales to cover all school holidays. 

A steering group of Government departments and agencies is planning the expanded programme. Members include the Youth Justice Board, Connexions, the Children's Fund, the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit and the Home Office. The Government is understood to have allocated £25 million to the scheme, from a budget pooled from the above agencies. The expanded scheme is provisionally called Positive Activities for Young People. It will expand summer activities for eight to 19-year-olds to a year-round brief. 

The Government announced in January 2002 that Splash Extra resulted in a 5.2% reduction in crime in the parts of the country where the schemes ran. In some areas, results were more dramatic. Avon and Somerset saw street crime and robbery fall by 31% in neighbourhoods where there were such projects. 

Splash Extra built on the Summer Splash programmes of cultural, sport and entertainment activities that were run in 2000 and 2001. £8.8 million of funding from the New Opportunities Fund allowed these activities to be expanded nearly 10 times in 2002 as part of the Government's Street Crime Initiative. The money was channelled to projects through the Youth Justice Board. 

The Reading Agency is acting as a national coordinating agency for partnership work between libraries, youth offending teams and youth services. 
In summer 2002, ten library authorities ran reading inspired interactive arts events for young people in targeted areas. As well as crime reduction, this work aimed to improve literacy skills and open up of a whole new world of creative imagination to young people whose homes are book free zones and who think that reading is "not for them". Visit www.readingagency.org.uk.

(Young People Now, 22 January 2003 and 30 April 2003)

The Prince's Trust is hoping to reach out to youngsters who leave school with no GCSEs with a £5 million scheme to help improve their basic skills.

See the story on www.bbc.co.uk for more information. 

(BBC News Online, 28 August 2002)

Ten library authorities have received up to £30,000 to spend on a programme that aims to help stop young people from committing criminal acts over the summer. The programme, Splash Extra, is part of a larger Government initiative, Splash, which identifies potential young offenders in specific crime hotspots and engages them in arts and sport activity. 

The recently formed charity The Reading Agency has chosen the 10 library authorities to benefit from the initiative: Birmingham, Blackburn with Darwen, Bradford, Knowsley, Lambeth, Liverpool, Manchester, St Helens, Stockport and Tower Hamlets. Sue Stewart, coordinator, "We asked authorities to bid for funding based on what they thought they could run properly. They had to have an existing relationship with youth offending teams or youth services."

The participating libraries will invite artists who work with text or images to perform. They will link their art to the idea of words, reading and books. The artists range from cartoonists and video performance artists to text message artists and a wheelchair-using, judo-practising graphic wordsmith. 

Gary McKeone, Arts Council literature director, said: "This year the government wants to run activities that focus on skills development, especially literacy and numeracy." It is the first year that literature has played such a crucial role in the summer Splash programme. Ms Stewart said: "In four to five weeks we may not make avid readers out  of everyone. But even some basic changes can be a watershed in the lives of children who may never willingly have picked up a book."

Splash is now in its third year, with about 300 schemes running across the UK. Splash Extra received funding from the New Opportunities Fund, devised specifically to support arts activities.  The programme runs from 22 July to 1 September. Each scheme has 160 participants in two age groups: from nine to 12, and from 13 to 17. 

For more information email penny.shapland@readingagency.org.uk or visit www.readingagency.org.uk.

(The Bookseller, 2 August 2002)  

Mentoring schemes, seen as a useful way of working with pupils at risk of educational failure and disaffection, have proliferated in recent years. The Commission for Racial equality has secured £4 million funding for its Millennium Mentors Awards Scheme, aimed particularly, but not only, at helping young black people who have begun to get entangled with the police, to get involved in community life. 

The project is to be run by training agency RPS Rainer through racial equality councils. The Government supports mentoring as a tool for raising aspiration in Afro-Caribbean pupils, and in other groups of at-risk pupils. The Government-sponsored National Mentoring Network, established in 1994, now has 600 member organisations, a third recruited in the last year. 

The National Mentoring Network, which has information on new and existing schemes and issues a quarterly bulletin can be contacted on 0161 787 8600. 

The Divert Mentoring Handbook, on how to set up and run a mentoring project, is available free (plus £1.50 p&p) from Divert Trust, 33 King Street, London WC2E 8JD. Tel: 020 7379 6171. 

The African and Afro-Caribbean People's Advisory Group, a south London charity helping families with school issues, which has run over 300 mentoring schemes can be contacted on 020 8667 9222. 

(TES Friday Supplement, 21 January 2000) 
Projects to beat boredom cut crime  

Teenage crime has been cut by up to 70% in some parts of the country through a series of special projects including after-school and holiday clubs according to a report from NACRO published in March. It shows that the link between crime and boredom among disaffected youngsters in deprived urban areas is more than merely anecdotal.  

Making a difference: preventing crime through youth activity is available for £3 from NACRO, 169 Clapham Road, London SW9 OPU.  

(TES, 17 March 2000) 

 Britain's first "second chance" school was launched in March 1998, to pioneer a helping hand scheme for the country's 45,000 young people who leave school each year without qualifications. 

Entry to the pilot college in Leeds offers priority to the most disadvantaged applicants in the 18 - 24 age range, for example previously disruptive pupils, truants and dyslexia victims. The school has £150,000 European social fund grant. The school has a strongly vocational element and aims to restore pupils' confidence and build links with local employers. 

Students will be entitled to remain on benefit while studying on the basis that they are available for work, and that the curriculum has been tailored to link with the Government's welfare to work programme for the young jobless. 

The school will be monitored by the DfEE which will sanction further centres if it proves a success. 
Schemes to help the young homeless get the skills to help them off the streets  

London Connection, the largest agency for homeless people aged between 16 and 25 in the UK has developed the Connection Course which offers clients training geared to their specific requirements. One in four is dyslexic and many have had disrupted schooling. In rooms above the centre's drop-in cafe, people study basic key or core skills in literacy, numeracy, communication and IT. All the courses are home-grown and have national qualification accreditation.  

In Manchester, the City Centre group has designed the Get Up and Go board game which is used to introduce students to the realities of homelessness.  

In Bristol the Homefront initiative makes presentations in youth clubs specialist projects and schools across the south west.  

Resources  

• The Core Skills Training Pack is available from the London Connection on 0207 766 5555. 
• For details of the Get Up and Go Game or the City Centre Project's peer education programme, contact Alistair Hay on 0161 228 7654/5. 
• For information about the Homefront Initiative ring 0117 983 8823. 
• The Crisis Changing Lives pack can be ordered from Caroline Porter, Crisis, Challenger House, 42 Adler Street, London E1 1EE