Youth Workers Do Education (Beautifully)

I love the work of our volunteers around the country but I want to talk about what happens when you get youth workers involved in education.

In Sandwell & Dudley, it looks like this:

A young person comes for reading help. She’s really struggling and self conscious and, for the first few sessions, her youth worker/tutor Ellie thinks she may not make any progress. Then all of a sudden it clicks and she’s off and reading -using her new strategies to attack the long words required of a secondary school student.

And what do her teachers notice? Yes, her reading has improved and she’s able to engage in lessons, but the equally important thing is that this Year 10 pupil has, for the first time, got friends at school. For a teenager, improved reading is about so much more than books.

At another school, youth worker Amy is sent a young woman who has serious self-esteem issues. The school assumes that these problems will be sorted by Amy in her mentor role. But it turns out that this student has been laughed at by classmates because she’s been forced to read aloud and just can’t do it. (That’s another blog post altogether  – some teachers should be named and shamed.) Anyway, Amy, as both trained youth worker and reading tutor helps this young woman to hold her head up in a classroom because she can now read.

If you’re interested in how youth workers can support reading in your school, get in touch here.