Category archives: Uncategorized

Thursday, 7 June 2012

Youth and Philanthropy Initiative

I’ve been meaning to blog about the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative for ages. It’s a wonderful citizenship scheme operating through schools that gets young people actively engaged with their local communities and with charities.

Students research social needs in their area, working in small teams. Each team identifies a locally based charity that tackles the issue they care about most. They visit it, then prepare a presentation highlighting why they believe it is worthy of support. The team judged to have made the best presentation at a final event in the school is given a cheque of £3000 to award to their charity. The photo is of this year’s winning team at Nightingale Academy with their citizenship teacher.

I have been a YPI judge for several years, and I love it. Watching the presentations is inspiring. Many teams are brilliantly creative. I have seen moving drama, heard amazing poems and music, admired striking use of ICT, and even of clothing. The commitment the students display for the causes they espouse is fantastic. Some teams in the final I was on the judging panel for last week had visited their chosen charities ten times. I often hear about students continuing their involvement in their charities for months or years after the event.

YPI fosters so many skills and aptitudes. Teachers frequently express astonishment about students’ boost in confidence. Quite often the winning team consists of students who have never before excelled in school. Passion is far more important than academic credentials.

It’s great to play a small part in such a valuable scheme.

Thursday, 19 April 2012

Facebook and me

It took me long time to get round to it, but I have finally got a business Facebook page. I aim to use it to alert people to interesting things going on relating to children and young people, focusing on the issues that I am most involved in: children’s and young people’s reading, education, library and cultural heritage provision. Given all the work I do on special educational needs, family learning and looked-after children, I suspect there will be a fair amount about those. I am sure training will crop up quite a bit too. I hope it will be useful.

Thursday, 12 January 2012

New reports about children and young people

Lots of important new research has been published recently.

The Children’s Society launched the Good Childhood Report 2012 today (summary here). Shockingly, half a million children in the UK are unhappy with their lives. The Society identifies the components of well-being for children. These are some of the key findings:

  • Family is the most important component of most children’s happiness.
  • It is not the structure, but the relationships within a family that children care about.
  • Stability is important. Changes in family structure and frequent changes of home significantly impact on children’s well-being.
  • Low well-being increases with age, doubling from age 10 to 15.
  • Children living in the poorest 20% of households have much lower well-being than average.
  • Children who feel they spend too little time with family and friends tend to have lower well-being.
  • Autonomy and choice are very important to children’s well-being.
  • At 15 56% of girls and 32% of boys are unhappy with their appearance.
  • School and education are key factors influencing well-being.
  • Children who have been bullied are significantly more likely to experience low well-being than those who have not.

We know that child poverty has major consequences for children’s well-being and prospects. Another useful and disturbing report published by End Child Poverty this month highlights the scale of child poverty in the UK, and provides maps and tables.

In the light of the fact that spending time with family is so important, it is depressing to read evidence from children’s communication charity I CAN that work pressures are having a major effect on the amount of time parents talk to their children. In addition to the inevitable impact this has on children’s happiness, it is deeply worrying in terms of what it means for children’s speaking and understanding skills and their ability to learn.

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

Proposed changes to the English national curriculum

I suspect that many people may not have spotted the publication of the proposed changes to the English national curriculum in the run up to Christmas. These are some of the significant proposals:

  • The national curriculum should set out only the essential knowledge (facts, concepts, principles and fundamental operations) that all children should acquire.
  • Key stage 2 should be split into a lower and upper KS2.
  • Key stage 3 should be reduced to two years, and key stage 4 expanded to three.
  • Oral language should be a key feature of the new curriculum.
  • Modern foreign languages, history, geography and design and technology should be compulsory subjects up to the age of 16.
  • The system of measuring progress by levels should be ended.

Implementation of the revised curriculum has been put back to autumn 2014. There will consultation between now and then.

Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Exhibition of art by offenders

There are just a few days left to see the inspirational Koestler Trust exhibition of art by offenders and secure patients at the Royal Festival Hall. I am so pleased to have got to it. My especial interest was in the young people’s works on display, because of the training I give on engaging with young offenders. I found their art moving and poignant, and in some cases beautiful, disturbing or funny. I was delighted that the fabulous 1066 animation made by young people with the Norfolk Youth Offending Team and the Castle Museum, which I have blogged about before, is on show, and has won a special award for animation for under-18s. There is another fabulous animation, Call for Help,  about a trip to Hell, made by a group of six young offenders at Blair House YOI. Disappoint Man, a tellingly-named portrait by an anonymous inmate at Feltham YOI, is troubling and enigmatic: does the face portray fear, aggression, distrust, or perhaps all of these? The blurb written by the anonymous creator of a lovely picture called Snowfields, who comes from a secure children’s home in Scotland, particularly struck me: ‘I was not interested in art at all until I was placed into a secure centre. I believe art has helped to increase my confidence in myself.’ Underlining this, a poster in the exhibition demonstrates the impact of the arts on young offenders’ lives: 75% of young offenders who participated in summer arts colleges run by Unitas in 2009 went onto further education, training or employment.