Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

We believe that parents are the best role models for children and their presence in the school can help motivate children and ultimately raise their attainment. We support and encouragement parents to become volunteer helpers within the school. All parent volunteers undertake a new 3-session training programme, which looks at issues such as: roles and responsibilities of volunteers, confidentiality and communication skills. For many of our parents, helping in the school is the first step in returning to education or employment. Undertaking voluntary work helps raise confidence; self esteem, and increases skills. Volunteers often gather together to share experiences and gain support.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

My role within the network is to support the development of peer mediation in Scotland. Peer mediation is offered to young people in 102 schools in Scotland. We know that young people in conflict find it difficult to attend school. We know that young people worry about a number of issues in school including; bullying, having no friends, moving on to secondary school, finding their way around a new school, playground arguments and fights. Some young people have so many problems it is easy to see how this affects their ability to learn. Most peer mediation trainers will describe the added value of young people participating in the training which helps to give basic communication and problem solving skills. As an adult I know that conflict affects your ability to learn. In some Scandinavian countries conflict resolution is part of the curriculum. It would be great to have the same in Scotland. Peer mediation also frees up teaching staff time as issues are often resolved by the students using mediation.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

We do a lot of work with families to improve the home environment. We will attempt to motivate parents/carers in terms of their child’s education and put in place the structure so that children are able to engage consistently at school. We will meet with the family and discuss the importance of routines and ask, for instance, children how they feel about staying up until midnight and not going to school the next day. We will also ask parents/carers to reflect on the life they would like their children to have.  Most children will tell us that they do want to be at school so it is about supporting the family to make this a reality. It often comes down to the practical things like calling round to the home to get the child up and off to school.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

We have worked in partnership with Falkirk College to provide an accredited Play certificate that we have offered to parents and carers of children who have been referred to our service. This can bring a range of benefits for the whole family. It helps parents to develop skills and strategies to play and positively engage with their children. In turn the accreditation can help build their confidence and aspirations. Most importantly, it can help them to appreciate the importance of education and encourage them to be more active in developing their child’s enthusiasm and motivation for learning. Adult learning can also reduce some service user’s sense of isolation, increase their self-esteem and encourage them to pursue further opportunities for learning.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

School attendance is a huge issue for the young people we work with and getting them to consistently attend our service is our starting point. We find that young people who are disengaged from school will often get bored quickly, find it difficult to concentrate and are reluctant to work through what they see as dry course work. To try and tackle this we will ask them to identify a project, something which motivates them, and use this idea to engage them in other areas of learning. For instance, we suggest to them that it might be useful to use IT to develop and improve the project work which they have chosen to do. It is about making learning relevant. We can also use the computer skills they have learnt during their project work as evidence toward formal accreditation in IT. The sessions we do run are relatively short, 20 or 30 minute bursts, and will involve a combination of practical learning, group exercises and doing formal literacy and numeracy work. This seems to work in terms of maintaining young people’s interest.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

To enable disaffected young people to have enthusiasm and motivation for learning it is important to understand them and also work to improve interactions within the classroom. The young person who is abusive, non-cooperative and disruptive is also often isolated, vulnerable, anxious, scared and the victim of abuse. It is the same young person but the way we see them has implications in terms of how we interact with them as parents, as teachers and as other key adults. As a project we don’t think in terms of fixing the young person, we think about positively changing the young persons learning and living environments. This involves working with parents, carers, teachers, peers and other key adults to consider ways of interacting which can make the young person feel more secure and happy at home and in school.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

The music factory is a ten week course which gives P6 and P7 pupils the opportunity to write, play and produce their own songs. The end result is a music CD which is played at school assembly. It is a really valuable experience for the pupils, many of whom have not played a musical instrument before or tried singing into a microphone.  Music is a useful learning experience for the pupils as it involves working collectively and everyone’s individual contribution matters. Often the pupils choose to do a rap and the process can be quite cathartic as the subject matter is about an issue which they have at school or in the community. I think the sessions work well because the pupils have ownership and also the fact that it is a creative process.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

To stimulate enthusiasm and motivation in learning for the most disaffected young people, one strategy which we use in Kibble, is to build young people's confidence and skills in core curricular areas.  Almost all young people who arrive at Kibble have had disrupted school attendance which has impacted negatively on the development of their literacy, numeracy and communication skills.  One of our aims is to intensely support pupils to develop these skills.  Class sizes within Kibble have a maximum of four pupils and all young people are supported in attaining their learning targets from a group of Classroom Support Workers.  This intense learning and teaching situation allows very good working relationships to develop.  Through listening to youngsters we encourage them to build on core subjects by choosing from a range of optional subjects based on their interests and strengths.  Through a creative and enthused delivery of all subject areas we attempt not only to engage young people in learning, but for them to recognise the success and enjoyment of being Successful Learners.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

Young people are constantly going through transitions at home, at school and in the community. Some have the resilience and ability to cope and manage these transitions better than others. At school, things like changing class, changing teachers, having to respond to different teaching styles, these can be difficult for some young people to manage and on occasion they will react negatively. We attempt to support young people in small groups where consistency, listening and positive interaction are key factors. Through working with them in this way we attempt to help them develop their ability to manage change and to engage more effectively in terms of their education.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

One thing which we have discovered is that young people who are disengaged from school often have very poor listening skills which have prevented them from being able to participate successfully. Many of them only focus and listen for very short periods. As a staff team we only give information necessary to a task in very small segments, put information on a flip chart so that the young people can refer back to them, break them into small groups of three or four to give instructions and reinforce listening by constantly checking that they have individually understood. We find that these approaches work well in keeping young people focused and on task.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

We work with pupils who are coming to the end of their school career and have no intention of staying on longer than they have to. By this point many of these pupils see the curriculum as irrelevant and are not working toward their Standard Grade or Higher exams. We attempt to work with these pupils to give them the best possible chance of success once their school careers are over. Our starting point is always to sit down with them and ask where they want to be, what they see as their strengths and which parts of school they actually enjoy. We are always very open and honest with pupils. Our conversation will often focus on their aspirations and how we can support them to get closer to that point. We will speak about the types of job they would like to do and will then go on to talk about the skills needed to do the work they are interested in. Through doing this we can help them to understand the skills they will need and the benefit of working to improve themselves in these areas.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

We have found that disengaged young people do not place great importance on accreditation of their learning in terms of a formal certificate. This is likely to be due to the fact that they have never achieved formal recognition in the school environment through, for example, performing well in exams. Our past experience is that if they receive a certificate at a celebration event at the end of the project where their teachers congratulate them then they will place much greater importance on it. Being praised and positively recognised by teaching staff can lead to a greater determination to reach high standards and a greater motivation to learn.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

Most of the young people involved in the Include Me Programme are referred due to various aspects of their lives causing difficulty in operating effectively within the learning environment. The young people have issues with motivation, display a lack of enthusiasm for learning and have issues with school attendance. Feedback from the school Partnership Officers is indicating strongly that the young people are making improvements with positive progression on school attendance patterns and involvement in lessons. For all the young people we work with co-operative group learning is a key issue and something which they have difficulty in doing. The Include Me Programme offers young people the chance to experience a positive process of being immersed in a group where group experiential learning and respect for others is key. We give young people the opportunity to try new, exciting things and the chance to make new friends which is helping them to settle in school much more readily.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

We provide workshops on the ancient oriental strategy game of Go. Go is very challenging, but easy to learn, and is very effective at engaging disaffected and hard-to-reach young people- a non-academic way of showing them that they have a brain! Go has respect for the dignity of your opponent built in to the etiquette, and, when you make errors of judgement, the board is a safe place to fail. For a lot of very chaotic children, just taking turns is a trust exercise. Also, in Go you can be sure that your ideas are being considered seriously, since to underestimate even a weak opponent is to court disaster.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

Providing support to improve the family environment is often the starting point for a lot of the work we do. Many of the families we work with have a range of on going difficulties, which often means that education does come have a high level of priority in their lives. These difficulties can often inhibit the child’s ability to engage positively with school. We try to help the family to attend to routines around bed times, with preparation for school and offer advice and encouragement around healthy eating so that they are rested and have the energy to engage with learning. We also work with parents to help them develop and sustain effective working relationships with school which leads to a true sense of partnership and influence in their child’s education.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

When reintegrating pupils back into school on a reduced time table then it is important to give them some input in respect of the subjects which they will be doing. Often it is Maths and English which dominate reduced time tables. It can be difficult for pupils who have struggled at school to be ‘reintegrated’ into subject areas which they have limited confidence or interest in. Space should be given for subjects which they like and are motivated to do. The Curriculum should be manageable and engaging.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

Teaching can be a lonely place. Practice is often developed behind closed door’s which is not good as it can be isolating. I originally trained as a teacher and have spent many years teaching in schools. When I came to Barnardos I could not believe the amount of time the staff team spend together talking about work. It is a completely different culture. We value support and supervision which gives us the chance to properly reflect on practice. I think teachers would benefit from this model. It should not be seen as a failure to ask for help. It is not just a funding issue with schools, it is also about investing in staff. We are constantly sharing experiences and borrowing each others strategies to best meet the needs of the young people and families we work for.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

The Project is linked to a local College who offer parents/carers short taster courses within the school. Recently, parents completed a 10-week course in Sign Language and then went into the classroom to teach basic sign language to pupils and teachers. These short-term courses help promote the school as a centre for lifelong learning and gradually reintroduce parents back into education. Having parents present and learning within the school sets an excellent example to pupils, who come to understand that learning is continuous. The Project has successfully linked parents into a variety of courses including adult literacy classes thus increasing skills and employability.

Working with young people to support them to be successful learners

We get to learn about everything and anything in xl, what we are interested in. We get the chance to work in small groups and you get to know the staff and the others in the group much better.