A group of care-experienced young people have been benefitting from training delivered by Sportworks with the aim of helping them improve their employment opportunities, while also developing their social skills.
Young people in care might be at a disadvantage later in life, so the course is about bridging some of those gaps and helping make sure that they’ve got the right tools in place to succeed, progress, and build their confidence.
A care-experienced young person has experienced elements of care within their life; they might have been placed into care or been living with other family members and have been removed from their family setting. Some may not be well suited to traditional types of education.
The 14-week course focuses on skills such as communication, adaptability, and teamwork as well as practical elements including CV writing and interview techniques. It also incorporates sport elements, which offer a range of transferable skills (even if a person is not sporty) like working together as a team and developing organisational skills.
Astrid, one of the young people on the course explained, “So on the course we have been learning about life skills, things we can put towards employment and overall, just being better at speaking, better at just being ourselves really!
We’ve been learning things like problem solving, how we can appear more employable, and we’ve been training a little bit for interviews. Every Thursday we get together, we play some sport. It varies from week to week, but the main key to all these sports is in fact teamwork.”
Speaking about the course Rachael Bland Programme Lead North East, North West and Yorkshire at Sportworks said “Obviously, employability skills are great, but we hope they’ve also found a group of other young people who they can connect with, as we all know how lonely this world could be. And even if those connections don’t continue after the programme concludes, they leave equipped with the skills and confidence to bridge those gaps in the future, building meaningful networks both personally and professionally.
And then secondary to that is how we equip them with the technical skills to be more employable, to seek those opportunities, to be prepared, or if they’re not prepared, at least know the processes they need to do to get prepared for something like that in the future. And when that opportunity does come, that they’re able to put the work in to take that challenge on.
Our role has been to help them realise the range of strengths they already possess, while guiding them through areas for development they’ve reflected on along the way. We’ve taken a tailored approach throughout, tailoring the experience to their interests rather than delivering a generic employability programme, and we feel the group have responded really positively to this.”