Volunteer Spotlight - Gabe Evans Cayley

Gabe's Year 10 ACE group on their Christmas trip!

Gabe is a final year History student at the University of Manchester. She has been a volunteer with ReachOut since her first year.

I’ve been volunteering with ReachOut since my 1st year and it’s been fantastic. I’d always been passionate about working with young people and ReachOut has been a great way to maintain and channel this while at university. It has been a welcome break from the weekly uni routine; I nearly always come out of the sessions feeling energised and elated. A thoroughly rewarding experience!

I got involved with ReachOut after a friend, who had just graduated from Manchester and had volunteered for ReachOut throughout his degree, told me about the charity. He sold it very well and I knew I loved working with young people, so I signed up as soon as I arrived for my first year at Manchester!

For my first two years, we’d arrive at the school, get settled with our mentees and start an hour of one-on-one learning (English, Science or Maths), followed by an hour-long “fun” activity (anything from drama games to dodgeball). In this final year, the second hour has been taken up by planning, organising and running a mentee-led charity event, which will take place at the end of the academic year. This has been a great way to keep the girls engaged and bring home the character-building traits that ReachOut values.

My mentee, Elizabeth, is lovely. She’s quite shy (although she has her cheeky smile moments) and keeps herself to herself most of the time. She’s very intelligent, but struggles with the confidence to follow through with her answers and make herself heard - something which seems to carry over into social situations too. I think and hope that I’ve helped boost her confidence a little, encouraged her to speak up sometimes and realise that she’s always got something valid to say (and that she’s way better than me at Maths and Science).

The best thing about volunteering at ReachOut is getting the opportunity to build up relationships with young people and feel that you’ve had even a small impact on their lives. I’ve definitely not always been sure if I’m making any difference and sometimes you can feel a bit disheartened, but the little moments of realisation are priceless. Last week, all the mentees wrote notes to their mentors. Elizabeth wrote ‘I am thankful for all your help, you’re funny and amazing and smart too’ and I nearly burst into tears. 

On top of all the great experiences, ReachOut has helped me develop a whole load of skills, from working with and understanding young people, to leadership skills. It’s also really helped me reflect on my own character and confidence. You can get as much out of it as you want to really. What I’ve learnt in three years will definitely help me in pursuing my career - I happen to want to work with young people in the future, but the skills you learn are invaluable for all pathways.

I would recommend volunteering with ReachOut to anyone coming to study in Manchester or London.

Student Volunteering Week 2016

If you were asked to describe what being a student is about what would you say? Studying until the early hours of the morning? Big nights out on the town? Making new friends? Or how about volunteering your time to positively impact the local community?

Since the 1890’s, university students have been volunteering in order to give back to their adopted communities. Over 125 years later students are still making a significant contribution in the communities where they live. A recent NUS study states that 57 per cent of students in further education are volunteering in their communities.

Student volunteering has been a huge part of ReachOut ever since we were founded in 1994 by a group of university students. Starting out with just 20 young people from Manchester, ReachOut now operates across two locations working with over 1,000 young people each year. As we use a one-to-one mentoring model this means that we’re also working with over 1,000 volunteers each year, with 92% of our current Manchester volunteers and 65% of our current London volunteers studying alongside their volunteering.

Each February we support the nationwide Student Volunteering Week to celebrate the amazing work that our student volunteers do. This year we have asked our young people to tell us how their mentor has helped them and will also be running several activities during our sessions to say thank you to our volunteers!

ReachOut would not be here without the time and dedication that our volunteers show us! Volunteering two hours a week may not sound like much but in doing so you are helping your young person to achieve their potential and go on to lead a good and happy life.

So to all of our volunteers, we want to say thank you, on behalf of ourselves and the young people we work with each week!

Demystifying character

I was delighted to attend the Department for Education’s Character Symposium last month, particularly as Abdullahi Ali Aden, a former ReachOut mentee, was asked to address the audience alongside Nicky Morgan MP, Secretary of State for Education.  Ali also sat on the panel for a Q&A session with Ms Morgan and did a great job talking about character in the ‘real’ sense throughout.

Ali Aden delivering his speech at the Character Symposium.

And that’s what I want to write about today. It’s great that Nicky Morgan and the DfE have chosen to promote character education, because I believe this can be a game changing differentiator in the lives of our most disadvantaged children, and our society as a whole.  The DfE is talking with increasing clarity on what character is, but this conversation is still muddled as organisations and schools try to work out how government policy and character links to their existing work and how to implement these new ideas in working practice.

Ali Aden on the panel with Nicky Morgan.

Since I started thinking more in this space, I’ve heard many things being referred to as character, such as well-being (including confidence and self-esteem), employability skills (such as leadership and teamwork) and mental health.  Following a report by the Sutton Trust last month, personality has become the latest inclusion in this clumsy grouping of terminologies which is confusing schools, charities, press and politicians alike. Nicky Morgan made a good start towards clarifying the issue at the Character Symposium by clearly referencing character, well-being and mental health as separate entities that we need to deliver for our kids, which is helpful, and hopefully the rest of this article will clarify further.

Character is about the qualities that enable a person to lead a good life and be a positive contributor to society; not necessarily to be ‘successful’ and climb the social mobility ladder.  Of course all these factors are very much linked together, but ‘success’, considered in the economic or career sense, isn’t what character is really about.  A person of good character might be a shop assistant, a stay at home parent, a celebrity footballer or a prime minister.  They could be rich or poor, loud or quiet. Character isn’t about professions, social mobility, earning more money, being a leader, an inspiration or even a person everyone admires – it’s about being a good person, someone who consistently makes the world around them better in small ways or large, and we need to remember that when we think about what we want to achieve with our various interventions to help young people in this space.

Young people from ReachOut taking part in social action, selling cakes for charity.

At ReachOut we have four character strengths which we support our young people to develop, and by doing so we help them grow up to be better people.  They are Self-Control, Staying Power, Fairness and Good Judgement.  A person who possesses all four of these strengths in good measure will be a good person. This person of good character will be a benefit to our society, not because they are likely to earn good money in a high flying career, but because they will be honest, hard-working, considerate of others and measured in their behaviour.  This person of good character will make the choices that lead to emotional well-being, and will be able to apply themselves to learn skills to the best of their ability. This person will choose to utilise such skills in the best way possible for themselves, their family and community, and they will have improved personal circumstances as a consequence of this careful decision making. Their personality, extravert or introvert in whichever sense of the word you mean it, or whether they have the aptitude and desire to become a future world leader or a celebrity footballer, won’t affect whether they become a good person, but their character, and the actions it produces, will.

Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children & Families, closed the event, and in his speech he spoke of ‘demystifying character’ as something we are doing by discussing it at events like the Symposium. And yet I fear that by talking about character in such a vague and broad fashion we are doing the contrary – becoming increasingly confused about what we mean by character, and what we actually want to change.

Edward Timpson talking to Sam Johnson, mentee turned mentor.

Why is this terminology so important?  Because if we can’t identify what character is at the most fundamental level and communicate that effectively, then our work and effort in trying to build young people’s character will instead be used up in a series of interventions labelled as character, but really targeting other areas, many of which we’ve been pushing for years – such as promoting well-being or providing employability or life skills.  These causes are extremely valuable to our children and young people, but they are not the same thing as character education.  If we misplace our efforts to build character in this generation of school children we may waste the momentum in the field, and fail to make the difference we’re really looking for, for our children and our society as a whole.  So let’s be clear about what we mean when we say character education, and make sure we get it right!

Peter Blackwell
ReachOut CEO

Measuring character – is it possible? – should we try?

Maybe and yes!

ReachOut is already recognised for its approach to impact measurement: we track attainment and outcomes for the young people that we work with - attainment measures are a good hard external measure of achievement, and whether a student has gone on to work, training or employment is a good proxy for good judgement and character strength.

But we want to be recognised as the leading national charity focused on the character development of young people. This means we need to dig deeper - look at what we do, and find out how each aspect of it contributes to our outcomes so that we can ensure that our intervention has the maximum effect every time.

This evaluation will impact on everything we do – how we recruit, train and develop our staff, how we recruit, train and support our mentors, how programmes are structured, the character curriculum and how we deliver it, the focus on homework and also how we structure the club activities. It will help us to build the expertise and skills of every person in the organisation in order to deliver the best for our young people.


How will we do this? Collaboration is the key

We are collaborating with other charities, academics and measurement experts. We want to be a leader in an educational movement that raises the importance of character development in all schools – regardless of whether we are working with them directly. To do this we’ve worked closely with the Jubilee Centre of Character and Virtue who are doing some ground-breaking studies that demonstrate the importance of character in education and in the wider world; we’ve become part of the Fair Education Alliance so are working alongside organisations like Teach First and Save the Children to demonstrate the importance of character, wellbeing and social emotional skills in tacking educational disadvantage; we are being advised by the Education Endowment Foundation on evidence – they are a real centre of expertise in this and have been really generous with their time in helping us find the right measures to kick off this process. We are big fans of using existing measures and building up a body of knowledge across the UK – which is their objective too so we’ve got a lot in common. And finally – we are working closely with the Department for Education – advising them on character and feeding in our knowledge and experience to help them achieve our shared aim of embedding character education into all schools.

This February, we are on the cusp of piloting our first character measurement survey developed with the support of the Education Endowment Foundation. This survey will be a huge step towards helping us to track the development of character, and help us make good on our promise of supporting young people to reach their full potential. Exciting times for us and for character education as a whole! 

We will keep you updated on how we get on.

Alison Braybrooks
Director of Fundraising and Impact
London

Workshops, Workshops and More Worksops

Our Lady's year 7 At Zurich

It has been a busy start to 2016 here at ReachOut Manchester, with six projects attending workshops with our corporate partners and supporters. Workshops are always a great way for our young people to find out more about the world or work and what opportunities are out there for them once they leave education.

The year 9 Academy at The Barlow High School nipped into RBS in Spinningfields to try their hands at event management. The RBS volunteers and the mentees worked in teams to organize the best music festival possible, with great acts, food stalls and plenty of toilets! Adele? Taylor Swift? Ariana Grande? Our festivals had them all! The RBS volunteers were great and really encouraged the young people to think about the financials of the project, balancing out the impulse to book all the biggest and best acts without a care for the cost.

The Barlow Year 9 at RBS

Our year 7s at the St Paul's Academy were at BNY Mellon to brush up on their stock market knowledge. The budding stock traders grouped up into teams and set to work developing a profitable portfolio of stocks and commodities (with fake money unfortunately). Even after some turbulent economic events, our budding traders managed to turn a profit. Could there be a new Warren Buffett at St Paul's? As usual, the BNY volunteers were great at giving the young people a taste of the investment banking world.

St Paul's year 7 at BNY Mellon

Ever wondered what happens behind the scenes when you get your car insured? The year 8 Academy from Our Lady's high school went along to Ageas insurance to find out. The group was split into teams, each with its own Ageas insurance guru. The teams were approached by brokers with particular insurance problems and asked to come back with a quote. A fleet of 100 taxis? A Mercedes dealership? A haulage company? They insured them all! Thanks to the amazing Ageas volunteers for an informative workshop.

For our year 7 Academy at Our Lady's High School, insurance was the name of the game again. Our long time partners Zurich, gave an inspiring talk and ran a quiz to test the mentee's knowledge. A couple of the mentees were so impressed by the building they were asking about jobs.

Our Lady's year 7 at Zurich

High street bank Barclays got into the festival spirit in December (See what I did there?), and ran a workshop helping our young people to organize a festival. Our mentees from the year 7 Academy at Manchester Creative and media Academy put their thinking caps on to create the best festival they could. The Barclays volunteers did what they do best and kept the mentees minds on the budget.

MCMA year 7 Academy at Barclays

Just why is Nando's so tasty? Well you can ask our year ten Ace girls project at Our Lady's Catholic High School. The mentees got a step by step guide to the running of a Nando's restaurant, learning about customer service, preparing food, and restaurant management. To top it all off, the mentees got to sample the flame grilled chicken and sides that has made Nando's famous. Thanks to all the staff at The Fort Nando's on Cheetham Hill road.

Year 10 Ace Girls at The Fort Nando's 

Our young people had a blast at the workshops and came away having learned a lot about the world of work. ReachOut would like to extend a huge thank you to our corporate partners: RBS, Zurich, BNY Mellon, Nando's at The Fort, Ageas and Barclays. 

We can't wait for the next workshops!