Catherine Holden, Course Tutor, Access to FE, Employability @ Bradford College
“The Access to FE collaboration with SportWorks has been a very successful programme. The level of professionalism and expertise from the tutors has been excellent. They have worked closely with our hard to reach learners, who have learning, behavioural and emotional difficulties to support them and guide them through developing skills in sports and sports leadership. From the early sessions in which they struggled to speak up in front of their peers and found organising and planning a challenge. They have all grown in confidence, ability and maturity; developing and building on their employability and sports skills. All participants have been able to plan, deliver and manage a coherent sports activity for a group of teenagers from ESOL back grounds. The language barrier presenting an additional challenge for the student sports leaders who had to use their leadership skills of patience, resilience and tolerance as well as developing non-verbal skills and using demonstration as a key leadership tool. All participants in the programme greatly enjoyed the sessions and feel that they have improved their knowledge and experience of working in sports.
The programme has been most beneficial to one particular learner who started Access to FE last year as an extremely shy individual, who did not communicate with his peers and was very reluctant to speak up in class. Since taking part in the sports works programme, he has practiced speaking out in front of others, developed his team working and communication skills and experienced a huge learning curve delivering sessions to his peers. This learner has had a challenging year with the death of his father, and despite taking time off his regular college classes to cope with this, he always attended the sports works session as he did not want to miss out.
Two students have been accepted onto the college’s level one full time sports course next year and 2 are going onto do public services in which they will continue to have sports sessions and be able to build on their leadership skills.”