The National Emergencies Trust has provided £4,005 of match funding
Steps For Peace
Warrington, United Kingdom
Aim
to help young people deal with their emotions and work together so they can better handle difficulties like living through the pandemic.
What We'll Do
Working in Liverpool, Warrington & Halton we will work with children and young people in up to two schools, offering a series of tried-and-tested social & emotional skills programmes with accompanying trauma-informed practical and emotional support. These will help up to 260 young people from marginalised backgrounds respond to the extraordinary challenges they've faced (and will continue to confront) during the pandemic and the recovery, thus reliving pressure on hard-pressed statutory services.
We will deliver up to 4 of our Tiny Steps for Peace programmes to up to 120 lower primary aged children. Over 1.5 days each class will get to participate in a life-sized interactive board game and accompanying exercises.
We'll also deliver up to 4 of our Small Steps for Peace programmes to up to 120 upper primary aged students. We'll deliver a full session to each of the four classes and train teachers to complete the course with our high quality educational resource, which they can re-use in future years. We also like to try and bring classes together upon completion to celebrate and cement the learning in a graduation ceremony where possible.
For those most marginalised or in need of some extra support from our teams of facilitators, we'll deliver our We Come In Peace! intensive course to up to four groups of 10 young people on the cusp of transitioning to secondary school. This programme is based around an interactive table-top game.
In all these programmes, young people will get to participate in games, roleplay, solve problems together, and reflect upon and process what they've felt and learned.
For each school we can supplement these core programmes with some ad hoc support from our trauma-informed practitioners, who can draw on their insights working with survivors of violence to help staff and young people deal with the difficult fallout of our tumultuous times.
Outcomes – How it Makes a Difference, and How We Know That
Together these programmes will:
Help young people recognise, communicate, and control their feelings – especially in situations of challenge, conflict or stress.
Improve beneficiaries’ problem-solving and teamwork skills
Help raise confidence, aspiration and self-efficacy – the belief within young people that they can improve themselves and their community.
High-quality evidence from the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), as well as the Youth Endowment Fund for preventing serious violence, suggests that socio-emotional skills programmes like these:
are of most benefit to the most disadvantaged young people,
improve behaviour, wellbeing, and academic attainment;
reduce the chances of young people getting involved in risky activities – especially violence – by helping them manage their feelings and reactions in difficult circumstances.
Our own work has been repeatedly and favourably externally evaluated by government-appointed specialists in recent years. In 2020 Ipsos MORI confirmed the positive impacts of our Small Steps for Peace intervention for 10-11-year-olds, for example.
We measure our impact using a variety of methods, including scientifically validated and reliable tools like Emotional Intelligence Scales and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.
Our Record
Throughout 2021 the Peace Foundation has been busy delivering the Steps Programme in the Liverpool City Region. We have worked with more than 828 young people and over 100 caregivers/parents, teachers, and other professionals.
Measuring the impact on young people using the questions taken from the commonly used and highly regarded Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and Emotional Intelligence scales we’ve seen, for example:
a reduction in almost half of young people reporting that it’s ‘completely true’ that they often lose their temper (from 51% to 28%)
a near-doubling of those rejecting the statement ‘I am often unhappy, downhearted or tearful’ from 34% to 66%, with 0 respondents fully agreeing with that statement at the end of the course.
Caregivers we worked with reported how their ‘time in the Peace Foundation has been very helpful to me [in] being a better parent…setting goals for myself and my son’.
An OfSted report on a school that participated in Small Steps for Peace concluded:
‘Pupils genuinely care about others and demonstrate a high capacity for empathy. A recent peace project gave pupils…opportunities to explore what their understanding of peace was. The written responses from pupils demonstrated a high level of emotional understanding and engagement’.
Teachers who have participated in other trainings offered by the Peace Foundation have fed back how ‘the games have been particularly useful in getting pupils to think about how they treat each other. I’m hoping to run an INSET for staff to share some of these ideas’.
Match Funding: Your Money Goes Further
The National Emergencies Trust has generously pledged to match donations up to £250 per donor and up to an overall maximum of £10,000, potentially doubling our target so long as there are more than 25 donors by December 15th.
This means a little bit can go a much longer way and increase our chances of quickly reaching the hundreds of young people we can help.
If we don't hit these targets we'll still be able to deliver and make a difference by delivering part of the Steps Programme, but at a much smaller scale than if we fully seize the opportunity offered by the National Emergencies Trust to benefit local youth.
This project successfully funded on 15th December 2021