Regional Updates
After a slightly chaotic but on reflection, hugely creative 18 months we are back to full face to face delivery in Wales. We are running back to back Comic Relief funded adult programmes and are running one day per week in ten schools across South Wales. Group sizes are much smaller than those pre-pandemic due to school bubbling and limited access to job centres and other referral agents of our adult course but its safe to say there is some incredible, life changing work taking place.
We have been able to target and achieve growth in our Behaviour Support team for schools thanks to funding from the team at SEWSCAP, as well as introducing our two psychotherapists Osian and Marcin to our Comic Relief funded Adult delivery teams. This brings the number of behavioural support staff in Wales to 2 full time, 4 part time/freelance and two student placements, which enables us to provided targeted mentoring and support to our SOHK Participants.
We have developed an exciting working relationship with HMP Prescoed who are referring prisoners on licence to our nearby Adult courses. We have had some fantastic early success In supporting prisoners into training and employment that will continue past their release date.
Our partnership with the WRU is also going from strength to strength with delivery of high impact Back in The Game courses and Summer Holiday engagement camps. We also set up a targeted programme in Rhymney funded by Transport for Wales that has now led to them funding a full schools programme for Idris Davies High school, targeting young people at risk of antisocial behaviour.
We have appointed two new programme managers here in Wales, Andrew Cotton as Schools Manager and Shaunni Davies has been promoted to Adults Manager. They are both working hard to maintain and grow the reach of both programmes and our excellent reputation in Wales.
Find out more about the SOHK Back in the Game Courses running in Wales HERE
I marked this May as 6 years at the charity and this last year has been one of the most interesting. I really enjoyed working with the other teams nationally to develop our "Back in The Game" online course and this led to us receiving contracts with the RFU, Department of Work and Pensions and Ingeus to deliver to their respective customers. The appetite for the course really blew us away and the hard work by our colleagues to get the programme together meant we were in a really strong position to get cracking with delivery relatively early on.
We have since moved back to face-to-face deliver and have recently completed our first in-person boxing course funded by the Quilter Foundation, back at the Black Prince Community Hub in Vauxhall. This was a huge success, with some fantastic outcomes for the participants and the staff also loved being back again!
We plan to continue delivering another three courses funded by the Quilter Foundation up until June next year and have also picked up another contract with The Department of Work and Pensions for face to face delivery.
As you will read from Torran's feature, our schools work nationally has taken off and in England this is no exception. We will see pupil numbers double this year and I am really happy that many schools are recognising the positive changes we are helping young people to make. Due to this expansion, we have appointed a London Schools Manager - Michael Sargent who has been an integral part of the London schools team for over four years now.
Finally, this month will see the launch of SOHK in Cornwall, which is being delivered by Sport for Cornwall Foundation and the Cornish Pirates, in close consultation with us. This will see two adult cohorts being delivered in Penzance.
Please keep an eye on our social media for more. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Linkedin.
It’s been a long year! Team Scotland rallied against COVID-19, despite the Global Pandemic and members of staff being furloughed for months at a time, we put one foot in front of the other, got creative and still managed to reach disadvantaged people with our life saving work. We delivered to 8 groups of girls and boys from 4 schools. During the time that schools were closed we delivered 72 fully online sessions including sport and personal development and pupils received 2:1 video mentoring (2 staff to 1 pupil.) Some of this mentoring involved parents and other family members.
We delivered 4 Back in the Game courses for Scottish job seekers and supported the wider UK team in delivering more. We designed and delivered a new ‘hybrid’ course- this involved an in person, outdoor, workout and then personal development/mentoring done via video call. This even involved a video cook-a-long with our partner Fair Start who provided each participant with a bag of groceries and a zoom link! We delivered 2 of these hybrid courses. In Edinburgh, 14 completed the course, 100% noted an improvement in their general wellbeing, 85% felt fitter by the end of the course. In Fife, 17 completed. 100% noted an improvement in their general wellbeing with 100% feeling fitter by the end of the course.
The DWP commissioned us to work in partnership with Streetwork to deliver our work to homeless people who had been housed at an Edinburgh Hotel and were therefore a ‘captured audience.’ This was the most challenging course we’ve done yet, but, throughout the project we engaged with 29 Street Work service users accounting for 66% of all those staying at the hotel. Since engaging 5 of those participants have secured permanent housing, 4 have done accredited courses, 3 have found work.
SOHK Scotland begin the new academic year with 8 schools on board and 3 new members of staff. We’ve just secured finance from The National Lottery to deliver 2 years of adults courses in Glasgow. The future looks bright!
