Peace Child International

Who is Peace Child?  

Peace Child is a small and highly effective UK-registered charity (no. 1095189) that makes a huge impact.   It has been empowering young people to achieve their full potential for over 40 years.  Peace Child is a youth-led organisation and places young people and their needs and views at the heart of everything it does.  Peace Child recognises that young people - particularly those who are vulnerable and disadvantaged - need to be better equipped to find employment when they leave school. Peace Child supports and engages with these young people enabling them to recognise their own potential and raise their aspirations.  It does this by delivering tailored mentoring to help prevent them from becoming unemployed when they leave school.  It provides a significant opportunity for them to change the trajectory of their lives at a crucial point.  Peace Child believes its work should have a lasting benefit for generations to come.

What problem does Peace Child’s work address?

For some children, life is complex and inequalities can begin at a very early stage, holding back development and access to opportunities particularly when those children reach the age when they begin to think about their future in the workplace, the 14-18 year olds.  Young people identify what issues matter most to them, and together with Peace Child’s highly trained and experienced experts they then develop the programme to address these issues through the Peace Child online mentorship programme.  Young people shape and inform every stage of the project.   

The Coronavirus pandemic could wipe out a decade of progress in closing the gap between less privileged pupils and their peers thereby exacerbating existing educational inequalities.  This must be addressed and Peace Child offers a vital lifeline to young  people in helping them improve their life skills and employment chances both now and in a post-pandemic world.   

The pandemic is having a profound impact not only to health but also how people learn, work and live.  School closures will have a very real impact on young people and their sense of belonging and their feelings of self worth - these are key for inclusion in education and when young people are deprived of physical learning opportunities, social and emotional support available in schools  - they risk falling further behind and of becoming isolated.

The pandemic has also brought with it the worst economic downturn for generations and a huge problem of soaring youth unemployment.  Young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, already face significant challenges when they leave full-time education and securing a job will become harder and harder.  

What does Peace Child do to address the problem?

Peace Child focuses on the educational needs and development of disadvantaged young people and works to improve their life and employment chances by providing innovative and highly engaging employability training which has been designed in collaboration with educational experts and through extensive consultations with young people themselves.  

Young people told us they engage in peer-to-peer training far more than they do with adult-led training. For this reason, our specially trained facilitators train young people who then learn how to train the younger pupils, thereby building their own skills and knowledge in the process. This creates a sustainable model and ensures that pupils engage fully with the project, which increases the impact of the project in the long term. 

Workshops include  ‘Knowing Yourself’  (identifying skills, self-reflection, personal responsibility), ‘At the Workplace’ (planning, organising, working as a team, showing initiative) ‘Communications’ (building confidence, interviewing skills), and ‘CV Development’ – how to build up your own CV and  show evidence of skills you have.

The facilitators delivering the programme are extensively trained, DBS checked and vetted by Peace Child.  Peace Child has excellent and robust child safeguarding processes in place to ensure the safety of everyone who takes part in the online mentoring scheme.  

The programme will help these vulnerable young people by giving them skills and confidence including:

• an understanding of the school to work transition
• the tools to improve their self-esteem and self-awareness
• an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses
• the ability to develop core skills valuable to any employer
• an understanding of the importance of developing their communication skills
• a rigorous understanding of how to fill gaps in their own skills and experience
• an understanding of what employers look for
• an understanding of where to get resources to support lifelong learning and self-improvement

How does Peace Child know its work is successful?

Peace Child has worked with an external evaluation consultant to develop robust pre and post training evaluations for the project.  Before the project starts, Peace Child will carry out structured interviews with the young people to establish initial 'baseline indicators'.  After the sessions, a final evaluation will be carried out and this will be compared to the initial baseline results. The outcomes will be analysed to show the transformative impact of the project.  The success of the project is measured by:

1)   how the training has helped them improve their self-confidence and self-worth to move towards employment

2)   how the training has helped them to develop skills that will make it more likely for them to gain employment as a result.

Feedback from students who have taken part in the training shows their self-esteem and self-confidence has increased dramatically: they have gained skills such as public speaking and time-management skills while gaining awareness of the skills and experience they already have. Crucially, the training is extremely empowering for marginalised young people who often start out feeling they have no skills to offer an employer and by the end realise that they actually do have a lot to offer. Moreover, they understand where their gaps are and how to gain even more skills and experience.  The training gives them the tools to unlock their potential and think about a positive future which will not only boost their confidence but also their mental wellbeing – something which was extremely important before Covid-19 but which has now become of critical importance.

Peace Child is constantly learning and reviewing its individual schools programmes and believes that with its online mentoring it can reach far more vulnerable young people in 2022  - and beyond, and continue to deliver a programme which is cost-effective and more importantly,  ‘on the ground’ effective.