Heres a short film about the making of  ‘Hectors World’. You can see the Hectors World films on the thinkuknow website, set up by the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre.

Whether theres any plans to create something similar aimed at young people I don’t know but I always think its a good strategy to target children as young as possible for stuff like this so that it becomes second nature. The thinkuknow site also offers a downloadable ‘Hectors World Safety Button’ that ’swims’ in the top of the screen and if a child sees something they don’t like they can click the button which will cause the screen to be covered ‘until they get some help’. What the likelihood of a child using that button is I’m not sure as I’m pretty sure its in most childrens nature to be curious about everything!

The buttons only for Windows OS which seems a bit sloppy (can it be that hard to do the same for Macs & Linux?!)

In low income areas that is. In what the Observer calls a ‘controversial move’ Oxford University will guarantee an interview for young people that have achieved good enough grades and that live in a deprived area. The University will take into account the schools performance that the applicant attended, as well as whether they spent any time in care and if they attended any programmes for ‘disadvantaged children’, in addition to checking postcodes to confirm if they live in a deprived area.

The scheme is controversial because it may disadvantage young people from middle and high income areas, but the University Director of Undergraduate Admissions says “I want to make sure that, if students are applying from places that have very few people progressing into higher education, we recognise that they are breaking the mould.”

I sympathise a little with those that think it provides an unfair bias against better off young people in so far as Continue Reading »

Something thats been on my todo list for a long time is to write up some lesson plans for how to use some of our resources. I’ve now taken it off my list - not because I’ve done it but because I don’t intend to for the foreseeable at least.

It was towards the bottom of my list anyway, mostly because I wasn’t sure how much value they’d actually have - afterall each resource already has a written guide on how to use it. The lesson plans would have been more along the lines of helping people see how the use of the resources fit within whatever curriculum they were using it within. But having seen some of the teaching resources my wife has had available during her teaching practices I now thinking writing lesson plans would in some ways be supportive of something I’m in principal against - the accreditation culture. Continue Reading »

I’ve been starting to pull ideas together for the Social Innovation Camp this coming weekend. I’m already to think the ‘Personal Development Reports‘ will be more of a ‘Soft Skills Plotter’ albeit the measurement of development over time is critical so hopefully a better name will come up in time.

For the concept to work there are two key factors - usability and credibility. Credibility will take some time but one of the main ways of achieving this will be through use so I’m very much hoping that over the weekend I’m lucky enough to get to work with technical people who are able to make very complex things very simple!

In terms of use I think those that will find the system most useful will be:

• Young People - becoming aware of their skills and feeling confident to talk about them
• Practitioners - measuring impacts of projects and comparing different the outcomes of different programmes and projects
• Employers & Educators - understanding what soft skills are and who has what

So we’ll need to understand what soft skills are too! And then having worked out what they are we then need to find a sensible way of helping people assess them over time (and in a way that they understand and enjoy).

This isn’t something new to me - our kind of work has far more outcomes in the soft skills area than anything else and its always been a frustration that its so difficult (and questionable!) to measure the ‘journey’ that people have gone on. If you ask yourself the question “what kind of a person was I five years ago and what skills have I developed during that time?” - its very difficult to answer other than in terms of hard skills & experiences “I was a Supervisor, now I’m a Manager” or “I completed my Diploma or I did a First Aid Certificate” - but this doesn’t give a real insight into the person you are and what you have to offer.

Anyway back to what those soft skills are. I’ve been building a list and Continue Reading »

I’m very pleased (and surprised) that an idea I submitted for ‘Personal Development Reports’ has been selected to be one of the ideas to be developed at the Social Innovation Camp next month in London. This convention has had a fair amount of positive publicity lately particularly on online media. It’s been mentioned numerously in passing in various forums with huge traffic, just a couple of days ago a long thread about this was posted on Pokerstars

You can read the details about what this is here (and please do add comments if you have suggestions for its use/development).

The concept is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and is based on the booklets we use (details here) and also the Youth Awards site that we’ve been developing for some time (and still have a very long way to go!).

The Personal Record Cards we currently offer aren’t designed to be an assessment of young peoples skills - their purpose is to try and make young people aware of their personal skills and qualities and also to encourage adults working with them to have conversations about these things.

Now in theory the booklets could also be useful as evidence of young peoples learning/development - but to use them this way depends on young people using them honestly (and understanding the various ratings), and the supporting adult keeping good records.

An online version can take the principle of this idea much, much further. First of all the questions can be Continue Reading »

I wrote a few weeks ago about the Grace Orphan Project in Zomba, Malawi and that we had offered to sponsor some of the children so that they can go to School. Well I’m very pleased that today we’ve agreed to support 10 children to go to school including covering the costs of their school uniforms, text books and extra tuition.

I’ll post updates on how this progresses later in the year.

The cost for each childs school fee is an average of £21 a year! Not a lot to us but if you consider that the average wage in Malawi is about 80 pence a day (£24 month) then relatively thats a very large amount and for children without parents there may be nobody to provide any kind of financial assistance.

We’d like to support more children in the future so we’re on the look out for any kinds of donations towards this. All money donated will be used directly for the work of the Grace Project - if you’d like to make a donation send us an email to info@yomo.co.uk

Update:

I’ve set up a group on facebook: “I’ll give up 1 thing to help a child in Malawi go to School for a Year”

Something that really affects you when you’re out there is that you eat in a restaurant - a meal that is very average by our standards - but you think all of the time that the food you leave is much more than the children you’ve been with will get to eat. So the idea of the group is to give up something for a short period of time - it can be a luxury - chocolate, expensive drinks & so on, but give it up for a short time and put the money you would have spent to one side and then send it over to us and we’ll make sure its used to support the children involved in the Grace project. Its a small gesture but I can’t emphasise enough that its something that will make a very big difference - its a very simple way of investing in people to help themselves. If you’re not on facebook you can still do it anyway!

Its a constant challenge for people working with young people in projects and activities to be able to prove the value of what they’re doing - especially if many of those benefits are in so called ’soft skills’ - things like confidence, working relationships, being organised etc.

They’re called soft skills but they’re towards the top of the list of things that employers look for, so they’re very important. We had the same issue for our Apprentice Trainer Programme - if you speak to the young people involved with that many of them will talk about all sorts of benefits the experience had for them - but we never had any way of measuring this - even the research that was done on the programme doesn’t really give a true picture.

A main feature of our Prospective resource is the process of linking up young peoples skills and interests with other peoples needs. Prospective ends with young people identifying various’ actions’ they would like to take, and these Actions can be group or individual actions. The Outline resource includes ‘Personal Record Cards’ - these are things we developed because we recognised that many youth workers weren’t taking advantage of the opportunities available during a project to help young people develop personally - there was a tendency to just see it as a ‘group thing’. So we developed Personal Record Cards to allow young people to give themselves Continue Reading »

The Final Research Report based on the ‘Apprentice Trainers’ involved with the Young Movers programme is now available (copy attached).

The Apprentice Trainer Programme was our way of training up young people to deliver the training on our courses. The programme was never originally designed to be led by young people - our focus was to provide good training courses. We started by using the model used on the adult programmes at the National Communities Resource Centre which is to tender out and bring in external consultants and trainers. As we ran courses this way we also started to get an interest from people wanting to volunteer for courses - so we took some of these on and then eventually there came a point where I realised we should be making better use of the skills that volunteers had. So we did this bit by bit and then we got to a point where I got the most involved volunteers together and asked them if they thought they were capable of running courses themselves. A small group of us led a few courses and then finally we got Continue Reading »