Hackney MP passionate about young people

“ReachOut proves that with the right focused support young people at risk of disengaging or underachieving can do phenomenally well. We must never write off Hackney’s young people and ReachOut’s work demonstrates why – their graduates achieve above average despite the challenges they face early on in life.”

Last night Meg Hillier, MP for Hackney South, dropped in on the Y7 and 8 ReachOut Academy projects in The Petchey Academy, East London, where mentors and mentees were working on the “ReachOut Challenge” a brand new mentoring tool commissioned by The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues that we’ve designed to facilitate character development. Mentors help their mentee to recognise personal strengths and identify areas for improvement. Together they set “micro-challenges”, small actions that they try to do regularly to form good habits and help them to achieve good character and competence.

Meg discussed how young people need more just than academic tuition to succeed and was particularly interested in the character development aspect of ReachOut’s projects (as the debate on whether Character Education can and should be taught in schools escalates).

After the project Meg stuck around to meet some of our young people and mentors. Knowing that several of the boys were keen to pursue football careers she told them that there are more people working in the City of London earning more than £100,000 a year than there are professional footballers in the whole of the UK (most earning a lot less than £100,000 a year), however she still asked to be remembered when they become famous!

We look forward to hearing her speak at one of events in 2015!