Monday 04-05-2020 - 14:28

Students are helping to ensure local young people’s education continues during COVID-19.

Our Children & Young People Partnership teamwork throughout the year to bring student volunteers into schools and inspire local young people with on-campus action days.

During the nationwide lockdown, the usual programme has unsurprisingly been put on hold, but that hasn’t stopped our amazing team of student volunteers from finding new ways to support local young people.

COVID-19 exacerbates existing inequalities. Experts are concerned that the educational attainment gap will widen dramatically due to limited access to the essential resources necessary, for students to transition to working from home.

In response to these challenges, our amazing staff and students have been working to minimise the impact of COVID-19 on local young people’s education through the Connecting Kids project. Working in partnership with the university, the project aims to deliver much needed technology and supplementary educational tuition to disadvantaged young people in the Lancaster district.

Our student volunteers jumped at the opportunity to continue supporting local young people. In addition to our seasoned schools' volunteers, there has also been an amazing response from student ambassadors from across the university, coming forward to offer their help. From Warrington to Kuwait, volunteers will be supplementing students' schooling with online tutoring sessions on a whole host of subjects.

The student volunteers support will provide local young people with an alternative voice that we hope will help young people feel motivated and inspired during these challenging times. Whilst also allowing our own students to continue gaining essential experience through extracurricular activities.