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Taking Part

How all children and young people spend their time out of school, as well as in school, can shape and change their lives. For young people in care, whose life experiences have often damaged their self-esteem and motivation, the potential benefits of study support/out-of-school-hours learning (oshl) activities are enormous.

ContinYou was funded by the Department for Education and Skills (now Department for Children, Schools and Families) and the Department of Health to undertake a pilot project. The overall aims of the project were to improve outcomes for looked-after children through improving access to mainstream study support learning opportunities, both school and community-based provision.

Taking Part pack

As part of the project, which has been evaluated by the National Foundation for Educational Research, ContinYou worked with three local authorities (Greenwich, Kirklees and Nottinghamshire) to demonstrate how looked-after children can be best supported to take part in a range of activities.

The aim of the pack is to assist children’s services, working in partnership with other agencies, in making study support/oshl an integral part of raising the achievement of looked-after children, and of good corporate parenting. Taking Part will help those working in children’s services to devise a plan to extend provision to children in care, by enabling them to:

  • focus on the benefits of study support, particularly for looked-after children
  • consider the barriers to participation, and how an authority might address them
  • identify key allies in the authority, and how to ‘make the case’ to or on behalf of them for putting study support at the heart of the local authority’s strategy
  • ensure that strategic and child-level planning takes into account the importance of leisure and cultural activities as part of their study support provision.

The Taking Part pack is now available:

Taking Part seminars and consultancy

A series of three dissemination seminars was held in May 2005 to share the information learnt in the Taking Part project. A summary of one of the seminars, held in Birmingham on 18 May 2005, is available. Download the summary report (PDF file, 325 KB).

Following these successful regional dissemination seminars, ContinYou is offering tailored consultancy to support implementation of the Taking Part resources. Find out more ...

For more information about the Taking Part project, or how ContinYou can support authorities in developing this work, email Jenna Hall.