One week till Christmas! Here's how we've been celebrating...

Here at ReachOut, we've been counting down the days till Christmas for weeks now. We've had loads of events for young people, volunteers and staff to get excited about in the run up to the big day.

In London, we threw our first ever ReachOut Christmas Fete at the Petchey Academy for all our young people living in Hackney. There were lots of great games including an inflatable bungee run, bouncy castle and beat the goalie. Thanks to generous donations from Greggs and Sainsbury's Tottenham New we had a very busy cake stand too. The fete was staffed by a group of fantastic volunteers from Bloomberg and a few of ReachOut's regular volunteers. Thank you to everyone who donated their time or money to help make this great event happen. We'd also like to thank Chris King, who took the photos below.

Santa Mehmet

Junior Volunteers at the drinks stand

Volunteer Richard giving out crisps to mentees

Year 7 mentee Richie wins on the Bungee Run

Bloomberg volunteers making sweet packages for the fete

In both London and Manchester, we held a Christmas Pub Quiz where volunteers got together for a few drinks, a chance to meet to fellow mentors and some fiercely competitive quizzing.

The winning team in London

Quiz masters Jack and Joe in London

While we've been partying, our wonderful Junior Mentors have been volunteering this Christmas. Earlier this month, they raised an amazing £308.81 packing bags at Sainsbury's at an event organised by the ReachOut Society at Queen Mary University. Last weekend, some of our Junior Mentors volunteered for 'Film for Food', an organisation which aims to create awareness about food wastage, food shortage and food security. They packed boxes of food which were collected for Tower Hamlets Food Bank. We also had 10 volunteers who raised £1000 for us running 10k in Santa Suits!!

Junior Mentors Emily and Chin 

QM volunteer Ashley and Junior Mentor Mekki

Our fundraising Santa's before their 10k

In Manchester, we took our young people on some fun trips to celebrate the end of the term. Our Year 11 girls went trampolining at Jump Nation and our Year 10 girls went ice skating at Spinningfields Ice Rink. Each of the ReachOut Clubs had their own Christmas party on the last day of their project before the holidays.

The Character Conference

“Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education” Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

This was the underlying theme of Monday’s Character Conference, organised by Demos and The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, to discuss how policy can build character.

Tristram Hunt, Shadow Secretary of State for Education, opened the conference stating that we must nurture the right character in our young people to narrow the attainment gap and raise social mobility. Possession of good character is a crucial indication of lifelong success and it is the responsibility of both parents and schools to teach these skills. He also discussed the role of external organisations working with schools to deliver character education and share the responsibility with the teachers.

Several interesting panel discussions followed with three key areas for development emerging from the day's discussions.

Firstly that we need a common language to define "character", largely to ensure we are all on the same page, but more importantly, so that we can equip the young people we are teaching with the words to talk and think about their own character. As George Orwell teaches us in 1984, if the words to describe an emotion, feeling, thought or action, simply don't exist, it's easy not to think about them.

Once young people have the vocabulary to talk about character, they can reflect on their personal strengths and weaknesses, and then start to make changes.

There are many character strengths, or “virtues”, worthy of aspiring to that relate to various aspects of our lives and relationships. At ReachOut we have four Character Values (Fairness, Self-Control, Staying Power and Good Judgement) which are embedded in all our activities on our mentoring projects. They have become commonly used vocabulary among our mentors and mentees and I often hear them talking about the Self-Control and Fairness needed to listen patiently to another mentee presenting their work, or the Staying Power needed in a sports match when you are losing or even Good Judgement to attend Maths booster classes after school!

“it's all about the relationships”

The second significant theme was that the quality of relationships a young person experiences in life is strongly linked to their development of character. As Sarah Darton, Director of Parent Programmes at Family Links, put it, whatever programme they are on, “it's all about the relationships”.  Therefore, the strength of the relationship between the practitioner (e.g. teacher, youth worker or in ReachOut’s case the mentor and Project Leader) and a young person is key.

According to Darton, the teenage years are the most rapid period of change, when they learn how to plan and develop empathy. During this time it is particularly important for adults to respond to young people's feelings, as well as their behaviour, combining warmth and responsiveness with clear expectations and boundaries.

ReachOut mentors develop such relationships with their mentees over the course of a 6 to 9 month project, where they take part in both one-to-one and group activities, allowing for interactions with other children and positive role models, as well as time for individual reflection and support.

The third theme of the conference was around the best ways to build character. (There was no question as to whether or not character can be taught - it can!)

Lord Holmes, Paralympic Gold Medallist, spoke of sport as a powerful way to build character, to teach teamwork, fairness, staying power and how to fail but not give up “even if we lose, we play to win”.

“even if we lose, we play to win”

In fact, according to Dan Wright of The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, all extra-curricular activities are valuable in building character as they provide an opportunity to highlight and practise virtues, build relationships with adults outside the classroom and maintain appropriate boundaries.

The recent Statement on Youth Social Actionand Character Development advocates youth social actions as important for character building, describing it as “an important mechanism for young people to develop and express their character while benefiting others.” Baroness Tyler, Co-Chair of the APPG on Social Mobility, seconded this opinion stating that volunteering directly boosts employability and hence social mobility.

The #iwill campaign by Step Up to Serve encourages us all to play our part in providing support and opportunities for young people to volunteer. At the ReachOut Junior Mentors project young people are taught teamwork and leadership skills and helped by their mentors to find appropriate volunteering placements where they can learn through experience and then reflect on how the opportunity is affecting them (read ReachOut’s #iwill pledge here).

This is the final part of the ReachOut cycle - preparing mentees to eventually volunteer as mentors, giving back to their community and helping those around them.   The combination of academic support, character development and long term involvement  that ReachOut provides helps young people to succeed, to inspire those around them and make a long lasting positive change to those communities most in need. 

Professional Footballer Sanchez Watt visits the ReachOut Academy London

This week the ReachOut Academy London mentees were lucky enough to meet Colchester United winger Sanchez Watt who came and spoke to the mentees about his career as a professional footballer.

Sanchez spoke passionately about how our young people can achieve whatever they desire with a lot of hard work and determination. He attributed surrounding himself with good friends and staying away from negative influences to realising his potential.

Growing up in Hackney he is only too aware of the obstacles many of our young people face and his message was - don’t let the area you grow up in hold you back!

One piece of advice Sanchez had for our young people was ‘always listen to your manager as they always have your best interest at heart’. This was particularly important to Sanchez as he suffered a serious hamstring injury after not warming up properly before a training session.

Both the mentors and mentees at ReachOut had lots of questions to ask including what techniques Sanchez uses to psyche himself up before big games, such as his premier league debut at Emirates Stadium, and what advice he would give to young people who are hoping for a career in professional football.

After the classroom session the mentees took part in a football tournament with Sanchez captaining the girls’ team who managed to hold their own against the boys’ teams. A huge thanks to Sanchez for giving up his time to visit ReachOut and for inspiring our mentees!

Character Education - can it change who you are?

ReachOut volunteer Tom Akhgar looks deeper into ReachOut's mission to teach character.

When I first encountered the term ‘Character Education’ and began to discuss it with friends, common preconceptions arose. Conversations centred on whether Character Education was about changing innate traits of who we are, and trying to change ourpersonalities. Common arguments were ‘What’s the point!? How can we change our character!?’ and ‘How can we change our personalities or the general nature of who we are?’

‘What’s the point!? How can we change our character!?’

Character Education, as defined by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, is about focusing on what is ethically important in situations, acting for the right reason with the aim of developing good sense or practical wisdom: the capacity to choose intelligently between alternatives. Resilience, tenacity and self-regulation are some of the characteristics that are hoped to be harnessed, similar to ReachOut's character values Fairness, Self-Control, Good Judgement and Staying Power.

So is the aim of Character Education to change the core characteristics of a person, and If so how far can it go? Can it mitigate perceived less desirable character traits, such as anxiety or negativity? Traits which are perhaps a product of nature as opposed to nurture, but which play an important role in an individual’s ability to overcome failure and rejection, and weaken their strength of mind and ability to carry on. 

Last month in the spectator Toby Young wrote an article on ‘why schools can’t teach character’ arguing that character was predominately a product of genetics. Here he looked to The Marshmallow Test, an experiment by the psychologist Walter Mischel which took place during the 1960’s. In this experiment children were asked to forego eating a marshmallow for a given period of time, and promised two at the end of an allotted time if they managed to resist. Shockingly, there was a strong correlation between the children who went on to become successful and prosperous adults, and their ability to wait for two marshmallows in their youth.



Though the test alone seems quite persuasive, in his book ‘The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self- control’, Mischel has expanded upon this and has suggested that an individual can learn, through mental mechanisms, to manage self-control and develop will power and resilience. Here he indicates that a distinction can be made between a hot response to stimuli controlled by a part of the brain called the limbic system, and a cool response led by the pre-frontal cortex which is responsible for more ‘resistible’temptations.

The idea is that you can coach yourself to think a certain way depending on which part of the brain you activate. For instance you may have a craving for a chocolate; a way to manage this temptation is to focus on the size and colour, which, in this instance is the cool response, rather than concentrating on the taste and pleasure, which is the hot response. Through this and other processes, which Mischel expands upon in supplementary studies, Mischel suggests that you can strategize and develop a sense of staying power, he argues that this approach can apply to a variety of challenges in everyday life in order to manage stress and pursue a variety of goals more effectively.

The way we think and how we approach life vastly impacts the outward character that we portray, and also the way we approach challenges in life.
  
This idea of a strategy of thinking, or the perspective we can take when we look at the world and social situations, is something that is embodied in Character Education. The way we think and how we approach life vastly impacts the outward character that we portray, and also the way we approach challenges in life. An anecdotal example of this can be seen from last month’s Character Conference (available on character.org).  In one lesson a distinction is made between a fixed mind-set, one that sees intelligence or ability as a fixed trait, and a positive growth mind-set, which looks at intelligence as an ability that can be developed. These mind-sets often operate in for example six areas that can make up an important part of the way in which a person’s character is expressed. These include: goals, view of effort, challenge seeking, response to setbacks, response to criticism and views of others success. Through contrasting the two mind-sets we can see how different a persons outward expression of Character can be.

Positive growth mind-set - a goal is a chance to learn

The positive growth mind-set may, for example, look at a goal as a chance to learn and grow, rather than seeking an opportunity to simply look smart, and face the possibility of being wrong, perceived as stupid when not understanding a principle or concept. The latter would be typical of the fixed mind-set.

The positive mind-set will perceive view of effort as a positive rather than negative, with a lack luster approach to it, perhaps grounded in the belief that if you are not naturally good at something then what is the point at grinding away at it.

Challenge Seeking, would be seen as a positive access to an opportunity rather than negatively, perhaps even avoiding it through fear of failure.

The Response to Setbacks focuses on being Resilient rather than Helpless. To think of the available options and focus on alternatives, weighing up the appropriate action rather than being too quick to write oneself off before all the possible options have been assessed, thought about pragmatically or even revisited after reflection.

Response To Criticism is to be seen as an opportunity to learn and take on constructive feedback rather than being defensive and closed. Perhaps even argumentative in the response to constructive criticism.

Lastly a View of Others Success, be it in the classroom or at work may be a Lesson and Inspiration. Perhaps even an opportunity for networking and improving interpersonal skills. This can be contrasted with a fixed mindset that would look at others success and see it as a threat and something to be envious about.  This is a very limiting perspective and will also lead to a lack of opportunity for collaboration and gaining from team work.

We are naturally programmed to think a certain way, and have a knee jerk response to some things. However, thoroughly thinking situations through and engaging with them practically, perhaps for example following the positive growth mindset, may result in an improvement in character. We may not be able to change what we instinctively think, but what matters is how we negate negative characteristics that hamper an individual’s potential, characteristics which manifest themselves in response to life’s experiencesand challenges.  The key values of Character Education lie in the potential that the concept has to change a person’s outlook on life which may ultimately lead to a more positive and rewarding existence. 

Sir Richard Leese Visits ReachOut

Our year 12 -13 Junior mentor project was lucky enough to enjoy a visit from knight of the realm, Sir Richard Leese this Thursday. Sir Richard came along to give a talk and to hear from our mentors and mentees about ReachOut and the work we do. Sir Richard was once a youth worker himself and has been head of Manchester City Council since 1996. During his tenure he has overseen Manchester's rise to being one of the most popular cities to live in the UK. He was knighted for his services to local government in 2006.

During his talk, Sir Richard spoke about education in the city and how the council had been busy building schools to keep up with the growing population. He emphasized the importance of Manchester citizens being able to access jobs, for young people to be able to access the right opportunities and for all Manchester citizens to able to achieve a state of happiness. Most importantly, he emphasized the need for citizens to give back to their communities and thanked ReachOut and its mentors for their contribution in this regard. Of ReachOut specifically he said, "ReachOut is a good example of exactly what we are trying to build in Manchester."

So let's keep up the good work!

Xavier Bosch 

ReachOut Manchester

Photos by http://Cahill-Photo.co.uk

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!

University of Manchester students run charity football tournament in aid of ReachOut

ReachOut Manchester has a longstanding tradition of working closely together with the Univeristy of Manchester's Careers Department. As part of this cooperation, we ran a fundraising project consisting of five university students for the duration of two months.

Their task was to create a fundraising campaign that would raise funds for ReachOut projects and at the same time raise our public profile among the student population in Manchester. The university team decided to run a 5 a side tournament. The event took place last Saturday (no rain!) and we had a fantastic time with over 40 participants. 

We really enjoyed the games and it was a fantastic opportunity to meet many students who were keen to find out about the work of ReachOut. Thanks to the generous donations of Caffe Nero, Morisons and Lucozade we had refreshments throughout the day and amazing prizes for the winners at the and.

A huge thanks should go out to the university students who arranged the tournament. In total we raised £320 (plus we had tons of fun). We are looking forward to arranging another tournament in Spring time!

Secretary of State for Education supports Character Education

Last week at the Priestley Lecture, Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan backed the development of character education in schools to help prepare young people for "life in modern Britain". 

She said,

"Central to that is ensuring that young people not only grow academically, but also build character, resilience and grit. That’s why one of my first acts as education secretary was to announce that my department would have a new focus on character education.

We want to ensure that young people leave school with the perseverance to strive to win, to persevere against the odds, to overcome the challenges that life throws at them and bounce back with vigour and confidence, something that the expeditions of Sir Raymond Priestley demonstrate in abundance.

We want pupils to revel in the achievement of victory, but honour the principles of fair play, to win with grace and to learn the lessons of defeat with acceptance and humility. And we want pupils to become honest citizens who contribute to their communities, neighborhoods and countries.

Much of this work has been inspired by the work of the Jubilee Centre at Birmingham University and its innovative research on character education and its work with schools to build best practice in this area.

Organisations like the Jubilee Centre have been pioneers in recognising that character can be taught. Not through formal lessons in character, but by integrating character building activities throughout the curriculum. These skills, traits and virtues can be strengthened by activities as simple as asking young people to stand up and present in front of their class or to learn about the perseverance and personal sacrifice of some of our most celebrated scientists or to take part in competitive sports.

By focusing on these character building activities, schools can ensure that pupils emerge from school more fully rounded and better equipped to meet the challenges of employment and future life.

Like the Jubilee Centre we passionately believe that we owe it to today’s young people to help them marry the highest standards of academic rigour with the character foundation needed to help them flourish."

Read the full transcript here.