News, February 2007

CSV Education is pleased to say that interest in the Student Leadership Course has been extremely high, with a large number of schools and organisations signed up for delivery in 2007.

To date there are six educational organisations who have bought into the course for this academic year. These are Greenwich LEA, Sion Manning school, Shroud High school and Lampton school, while Blackpool LEA and East Lancs LEA are in the process of planning delivery.

The course offers young people an opportunity to develop their leadership skills through greater understanding of themselves and others. The course, modelled on the NCSL head teacher standards, has been co-developed and co-designed for young people by young people. Click here for more information about the course itself.

It is accompanied by the 20 Great Ways to be a Student Leader book, available for purchase as a stand-alone resource from this website. Visit http://www.csvcommunitypartners.org.uk/ncsl/20shop.htm for further information, including example pages and info on how to purchase the book.

LOG IT is a recently produced booklet from CSV Education to support two major programmes, the CfBT Active Citizenship Research project and the National Peer Mentoring Pilot.

For Active Citizenship, the book is a way for students to plan, record and reflect upon their experiences of Active Citizenship throughout the year, whereas Peer Mentors can use LOG IT to record elements of the conversations had with their mentee under headings such as what was discussed, what targets were set, and what went well.

LOG IT's format means that it can be developed for any project where it is useful for users to record and reflect upon progress. The booklet is in A5 size, made entirely from recycled paper, consists of twenty pages and is full of inspirational quotes and aphorisms to help users to organise their thoughts productively.

For more information, email education@csv.org.uk.

Project Team Challenge is a new initiative aimed at encouraging 13-19 year old students to get active in their local community.

The programme involves two initial training sessions covering team building, awareness raising on community issues, and creating an action plan. The students then identify, plan, and deliver a community project.

As well as delivering the training, CSV provides ongoing support while a new resource, A Student Guide to Active Community Involvement, helps guide students through the process by demonstrating how to go about organising a community project with teamwork as a guiding ethos.

Funded by Deutsche Bank, the initiative is currently being piloted in a number of London schools, and will be offered to more schools in 2007.

Staff on the I, ME Project have been working to raise the project’s profile in Islington throughout December and January in order to ensure that young people in care in the borough continue to benefit from the one to one mentoring support.

Dave Hopper at CSV and Glen Skeel at Central London Connexions have delivered several presentations to teams of Social Workers using a newly edited i...me DVD with the view to securing further referrals in 2007.

Free Child Protection Training is being offered to 15 volunteers from CSV’s SHINE and i...me projects. The training, which is provided by Skills4U, takes place on the 17th January and is being funded by Millennium Volunteers.