News
INSPIRATIONAL TRAINING18 May 2007 |
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| Having worked for Toc H for just over a year, Christine Scippo was invited to visit a London Youth Initiative training session, she reports about her experience. In my months working for Toc H, I had heard a lot about its youth initiatives and even met some young people from Cheshire who had been part of its youth mentoring scheme. This in itself was inspiring – children who haven't had the good fortune to be born to warm loving families, struggling to make a life for themselves in the social care system. Being mentored has made a real difference to their lives and given them the opportunity to be happy with themselves, more independent and looking forward to a productive future. Toc H's Personal, Social, Health, Citizenship Education (PSHCE) training is slightly different to mentoring – it tackles subjects which may challenge young people at some point in their lives and arms them with the knowledge to deal with them responsibly. When I was invited by our London Youth Team Workers to sit in on a training session, I jumped at the chance. The PSHCE programme broaches topics such as gang crime, bullying, safe sex, drugs and alcohol, depression and suicide, anorexia and many more. It is delivered to schools, colleges, groups and individuals and is tailored to the requirement at the time. For example, if a school is experiencing problems with gangs or bullying, the Toc H youth workers may be asked to go in for a couple of hours a week over a set period and will work with groups of pupils to raise awareness of the subject. On paper this all sounds really stuffy – but I was soon to discover that the reality is something quite different. On the day that I visited, the young people attending the PSHCE class were 16 year old NEETS (not in education, employment or training) and had been referred to Toc H through Connexions. I had expected a group of sullen, uncooperative youngsters, but soon discovered that this wasn't the case – and the reason why. Charmaine and David, who were the youth workers taking the class, are so ‘hip' and ‘cool' I think that the youngsters were quite in awe of them. Not only that, but Charmaine arrived armed with breakfast – fruit, cereal bars and fruit juice, announcing to everyone to help themselves. “I know that a lot of these kids will have come out without eating and we';re fighting a losing battle if we try to get them to concentrate while all they can think about is how hungry they are,” said Charmaine. The subject of the day was bullying. After a few initial fun ice breaking exercises, which included finding out 10 interesting facts about each other, we watched a heart wrenching video about children whose lives had been made miserable by bullying. There was an open discussion about why bullying happened, how it affected people's lives and what could be done to stop it. We looked at newspaper articles that had appeared over previous months, highlighting some really shocking cases of bullying across the UK. Some of the young people even opened up and discussed their own experiences. One thing that struck me throughout the session was the feeling of equality between the youth workers and the young people. They all interacted at the same level, and because of this, there seemed to be mutual respect, which in turn allowed the message to really hit home. I left the training session full of admiration for Charmaine and David and all of Toc H's youth workers across the country who are talented at engaging these young people so effectively. Mainstream education isn't the answer for everyone and to me this was proof that the ‘hard to reach' really can be reached. If you would like more information about Toc H's Youth Initiative programmes, email info@toch.org.uk or call 0845 643 0723. |  |