Scroll through to meet the Champions

BAME mentoring programme for schools across Sussex. University of Brighton BAME students mentoring BAME school students with the following aims: increased confidence, improvement in communication skills, increased engagement in studies and school life, positive change to aspirations relating to further study.

Beth Thomas-Hancock "Students enjoyed the task of figuring out how to make the selfie stick and it was good fun for the student and pupil to work on something together where one of them isn’t the expert."

Project contacts: Beth Thomas- Hancock, Student Volunteering Manager, University of Brighton. bt11@brighton.ac.uk

John Lynch, Consultant (BAME), University of Brighton jk33lynch@btinternet.com

Through SCTP, SLN:COP have funded workshops across 58 schools in West Sussex, East Sussex and Brighton and Hove to deliver impartial information advice and guidance to Year 9 to year 13 as well as training ambassador Apprenticeships from NCOP wards and providing workshops and events for parents and community workshops.

SLNCOP commissioned Community21 and their team of young designers to co-design engagement tools. These were developed to promote the participation of young people from target areas in helping establish what are the barriers and opportunities to further learning.

This enabled the generation of really authentic data and feedback relating to young people's diverse perspectives - and the events were pretty good fun too!

This video describes some of these tools.

In March and May 2017 CUPP and Community 21 ran a series of workshops with stakeholders and young people as part of the Sussex Learning Network National Collaborative Outreach Programme (SLN:COP).

The aim of these workshops was to use innovative visual methods to work with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to explore their aspirations for the future, their views of post 18 study programmes and the challenges and barriers associated with engaging with these. The workshops explored the fears, expectations and priorities of young people, and their carers/community leaders with regard to their participation in further and higher education in the future. The findings have informed the design and focus of the SLN:COP Innovations Fund, which offers seed funding to community-university partnerships to generate new evidence and approaches to improve the participation rates of under-represented groups.

Click on the link below to read the whole report.

October 2017 saw the first SLN: COP Project Exchange, a forum for all the projects to get together, hear about each other's activities and explore ways to collaborate.

The Community21 team working on engagement and capturing the SLN:COP projects is mainly made up from young people too. Our students are great ambassadors for continuing education with their own experiences to draw on they relate well to our young project participants. They bring a range of skills and experiences to the process.

The project’s aim is to give young parents the skills and tools to facilitate learning outside and at home with their children with a focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) and the fundamentals around growing your own food and healthy eating. Working across five centres in Chichester, Selsey, Midhurst, Littlehampton and Bognor Regis the project will engage parents and their toddlers over two workshops where the families will have the chance to take part in practical activities both in the centres and in the green space around the centres. Working alongside Dr Debs Wilkinson in Education the two sessions will combine play and exploration for both parent and child in order to achieve our aim.