posted by Alita Spink, Schools and Learning Support Officer

As term resumes for the 2015/16 academic year, 190 Scottish secondary schools are preparing to take part in the Youth & Philanthropy Initiative. Over the next year over 20,000 students will take collective responsibility for directing a total of £570,000 to small, local charities through YPI.

YPI Scotland is an active citizenship programme that raises awareness amongst young people about philanthropy and their local community. Each participating school, each year, is responsible for directing a £3000 YPI Grant to a local charity through a unique programme of team work, research and competition. YPI Scotland is about creativity and passion, leaving the four walls of the classroom behind and supporting the issues young people care most about.

The programme itself is delivered as a core feature of the school curriculum across a full school year group with flexibility from school to school. To date, YPI has been recognised in 12 HMIE reports with specific reference made to the programmes ability to develop wider achievement, enrich the life of the school, and support employability skill development. The Wood Foundation launched YPI Scotland in 2008. Since then the number of participating schools has rapidly increased. If you’d like to learn more please visit the website.

posted by Andy Garnett, Active Schools Lead Coordinator

The charity TCCL (Tayside Children with Cancer and Leukaemia) are looking to build on the success of their 2015 fundraiser in schools across Tayside, the Monster March, and increase the number of schools registering to take part in 2016. The ‘Monster March’ is a great way to get active and raise money for a good cause at the same time. The charity are fundraising to set up a holiday lodge in St Andrews for the use of children, and families, who are going through treatment. This includes Angus children and is intended to provide somewhere within an hour drive of the hospital that these families can go for a worry free holiday to spend time as a family during such a stressful period. The charity is hoping that an annual Monster March will help towards raising the money required and that getting children involved in helping other local children in need will raise their awareness of their ability to make a real difference to others in their local area.

The ‘March’ element can be down to the individual school and could be a parade/walk in the school grounds to be held on a day in March of the school’s choosing. This time the organisers, ‘Along Came Kirsty CIC’ who manage the fundraiser on behalf of the TCCL Lodge, are keen to expand on this opportunity for a more physical event or ‘march’. For more information about the TCCL Lodge including the Monster March, or for registration information, please got to www.tccl-lodge.co.uk or email fiona@alongcamekirsty.co.uk.

by Alita Spink, Schools and Learning Support Officer

     
The Thrive team in Scotland is supporting the 2015 Children of Prisoners Europe, June campaign ’Not my crime, still my sentence’ which seeks to help inform and raise awareness of the rights and needs of children separated from a parent in prison. Thrive is especially supportive of the campaign focus on ‘the child, their wellbeing and the bond with their parent, in whatever form this may be’ as this is reflective of the Five to Thrive attachment approach used by the project.

Thrive works with children who are separated from a parent through imprisonment and are impacted by difficult life circumstances. Thrive would like to contribute to a wider understanding of the difficulties faced by these children along with the scale of this issue.

Recently, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons for Scotland, David Strang published the 2014 inspection report on HMP Perth. The report highlighted the Thrive service as an area of good practice and recommended that the Children’s Visits Scheme should be further developed.

Did you know that?

• There are an estimated 27,000 children in Scotland affected by parental imprisonment. This estimate means that more children in Scotland will experience parental imprisonment over the course of a year than divorce.
• Around 60% of the prison population has dependent children. In the Scottish Prison Service’s prisoner survey 2013, 63% of those taking part had children.
• Only 5% of children stay in the family home when their mother goes to prison.
• During their time at school, 7% of children will experience their father’s imprisonment.
• Children affected by parental imprisonment are up to 3 times more likely to develop mental health issues when compared with their peers.
• On a more local level, on average over 114 children per month visit HMP Perth and are affected on a daily basis by difficulties surrounding their parent’s imprisonment.

You can find out more about the COPE campaign here http://www.notmycrimestillmysentence.org/ or follow them on twitter @NetworkCope.

by Alita Spink, Schools and Learning Support Officer

     We aiming to make this year’s Great British Beach Clean the biggest ever and we would love to invite your school to join in!

Throughout Scotland and the rest of the UK there will be events going on over the weekend of the 18th-21st September and we hope to see you at one of them!

Beachwatch is our national beach cleaning and litter surveying programme – helping people all around the UK to care for their coastline with the Great British Beach Clean being the flagship event.

Some of our best-loved marine wildlife is under threat from the waste and litter in our seas, with hundreds of species accidentally eating or becoming entangled in litter. Litter on our beaches is also hazardous to people so we all have a part to play in turning the tide on litter. Join an event or organise your own and be part of the most influential fight against marine litter in the UK!

We can help every step of the way.

Whether you want to adopt your local beach or just come along to one of our registered events we can help you make it the most educational and fun day out in the school calendar!

For more information and to sign up please click here.

If you are considering taking part in the Great British Beach Clean, it would be most helpful if you could let Alita Spink, Schools and Learning Support Officer, know spinka1@angus.gov.uk. This will provide us with an overview of the level of school involvement across Angus and how we are contributing to the ‘Clean up Angus’ campaign.

by Nicky Murray

Don’t let schooling get in the way of an education has been cited since the time of Huckleberry Finn. It defines education and schools as two sides of a coin. As a Head Teacher I believe the context for non-engagement suggests schools have built the capacity of the child to demand more from themselves and their education by enabling them to apply their learning elsewhere. This is happening at an increasingly early age due to the investment in early year’s education and quality of our schools.

Youth is marked by transitions; nursery to primary, primary to secondary and so on. These types of transition can be daunting for young people, so children choose to control what they can control and as a defence mechanism are engaging with the belief that real learning occurs out with the classroom anywhere and anytime. This must be partly attributed to the experiences children have in school but, as has been suggested, they are unable to make connections to. I strongly believe we must help children become active partners in their learning by shifting the focus from teaching to learning.

The ability to move from compliance to engagement will take time and, as Trish says, the right mindset. Education is about lighting a flame and if 4/10 children are not engaged with schools it possibly suggests they are still at the compliant stage in this setting. They perhaps, as Margo suggests, haven’t been able to make connections in the importance and relevance of their experiences in school. We, as communities have to support all our children to persevere on tasks and be more resilient in their thinking about an education so engagement can occur. Nothing in this life worth having comes easy. Being engaged at any level requires commitment and we need to support our children make sense of this and repair any disconnect the children have with the type of learning which occurs in schools. If children are not engaging with schools the question is who, why or what are they engaging with? I have offered one possible notion; control due to the precarious nature of social, emotional and academic transitions in education for young people may perpetuate this disconnect.