“Over the last few years, we have supported over twenty five thousand young people annually. Over the next few years, we have the opportunity to reach every single young person in the UK”
This is the opportunity provided to Speakers Trust by Education Technology or #EDTech.
The pandemic has forced us all to rethink how young people learn. From the parents who have become reluctant “home schoolers” to the teachers up and down the country, everyone has been challenged in a world where school was anything but normal.
For organisations like Speakers Trust, who work with 1 in 5 secondary schools, the last year has provided the opportunity to reflect on how we achieve our missions. In our case, how might we empower young people to “speak and be heard” in 2021 and beyond.
In March 2020, we were a traditional education charity. Our entire offer was face to face training and events, which were all designed to engage young people and develop their skills and confidence. The great thing is that this model worked. Speakers Trust have now reached over 400,00 young people over 15 years. Our programmes have demonstrable impact on the confidence and skills of young people.
Like many charities, digitally transforming our programmes, was an ambition that we never quite had the time for.
But the pandemic, created a need to rethink, and an opportunity to experiment and learn.
We have now had a year to experience how best we can combine face to face training, live remote delivery and self paced learning. We have embraced #EdTech and experimented with how we can combine the best of face to face learning with the opportunities that online learning has to offer.
The lessons learned have led to a transformation in our offer and our ambition.
Speakers Trust has always had the vision that every young person leaves school with the skills and confidence to share their ideas and perspectives. And our ambition was to play a meaningful role in this: to grow our work school by school, city by city, town by town. For us the limitations to scale have been finding the funding and then building the right team. Thanks to support from organisations such as the Jack Petchey Foundation, HSBC UK and individual donors our work reaches from Bradford to Bournemouth.
Online learning, however, provides us with the opportunity to make a step change in our ambition. We can now scale our work radically and deepen the impact that we can have with young people, through enhancing their learning experience.
We can finally see a way to reach every young person, whether they are at school or at a youth club, or learning independently.
In addition to the in person workshops, we are now able to offer every young person in the country the opportunity to build important life skills online, through our newly launched Speak Out Academy and the first of our online courses.
We invite you to learn more by watching the video above. To find out how to build the confidence and skills of the young people you work with, please use our contact us form