Community Youthworker for Cam and Dursley, Noah looks back at a new programme supporting local year 6 pupils.

“The Summer term is always a busy period and part of this is our work with Year 6’s as they become old enough to start attending youth clubs and readying themselves for their transition into secondary schools.

For the youthwork team, this means the rollout of our Year 6 Transition work, going into local primary schools for two one-hour sessions. During sessions, we run activities centred around communication, teamwork and team building with a restorative circle approach. The idea is to encourage them to open up and talk about their feelings and give them skills that will help them in life. In addition, this provides the perfect safe environment for them to meet their local youthworker who will likely also be in their secondary school, allowing for a head start on that relationship. At the end of the sessions, they are all invited to come to youth clubs.

This year we also piloted a weekly after-school youth club in Cam Woodfields Juniors for the Year 6s. Where we ran activities and organised games for them balancing the line between youth club and school allowing them to have fun and get to know the youthworkers while still understanding that they were in a school environment.

In keeping up with the youthwork principle of active participation and voluntary engagement, no one is ‘forced’ to take part in the games organised, and sitting out to watch, or playing a smaller game is always an option should they prefer. This has been a big success so far, with the young people really enjoying coming, the school being really happy with the atmosphere of the sessions and for the parents, it is an hour of child care at no expense to them.”

The pilot has been a great success and we will be exploring further work with year 6’s in the next academic year.