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 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
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!
We traveled to Malawi intending to use a similar model to the one we’d used in Tanzania - working with an International School to do work with children from local schools. This time though we wanted to be a bit more adventurous with our training!
We started by doing some group development activities with children from the International School. One of the biggest challenges here was that Malawian culture still has a very traditional approach to men & women. When we got onto talking about leadership and asked a group to decide upon a leader, I asked them why they’d decided on their leader - what qualities did this person have? “Well he’s a boy” came the ‘obvious’ answer along with an obvious kind of shrug!! (This despite the fact that Continue Reading »
In Tanzania all of our work was based with schools. We linked up with Tanga International School to work alongside their senior students and together organised a couple of days training with local school - Sir Johns Primary. The International Students all spoke English (though none of them were native English) and most of them also spoke Swahili. After a couple of days training up the International Students we then ran a days Sports & Games Course followed by a day of Performing Arts with about 100 children from Sir Johns.
What we hadn’t realised was that there was a timetable clash and so the Sir Johns children were actually still supposed to be on holiday! We also hadn’t anticipated being followed by a TV Camera Crew for two days - but it seemed we’d created a bit of a stir and so East African TV came Continue Reading »
I wrote a few weeks ago about the 
We traveled to Malawi intending to use a similar model to the one we’d used in 
In Tanzania all of our work was based with schools. We linked up with Tanga International School to work alongside their senior students and together organised a couple of days training with local school - Sir Johns Primary. The International Students all spoke English (though none of them were native English) and most of them also spoke Swahili. After a couple of days training up the International Students we then ran a days Sports & Games Course followed by a day of Performing Arts with about 100 children from Sir Johns.