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Engaging young people in learning: 

A study based on Rhema Youth Works, a youth work project working with potential 'NEETS', discovered that the following things helped the young people learn.

Short bursts of activity followed by a break helped maintain the young people's concentration and focus.

Personalised learning, which takes into account the needs and abilities of the young people, as well as their interests, helped engage the young people into learning.  Staff knew, for example, that some of the young people would not ask for help if they were stuck.  These people needed to be asked how they were getting on, however, other young people preferred to be left to their own devices when doing an activity.  Understanding these differences helped the staff support each person in the best way possible. 

Making learning fun, enjoyable and relevant to the young people helped motivate the young people.  Staff used the young people's interests to help them enjoy learning and develop other skills through doing activities that they enjoy.  For example, the young people like going on the computers and so by using computers to complete activities the staff helped motivate the young people to take part.  Staff also tried to make activities relevant, for example, one exercise designed to develop the young people's numeracy was based on choosing a mobile phone network.  This gave the activity a direct application to real life, rather than it being purely theoretical. 

Offering a choice to young people helped involve the young people in the learning process.  It allowed an activity to be personalised to suit an individual, for example, the young people could choose a person to write about in a writing exercise.  Offering choice also gave the staff potential to develop the young people's decision making skills.  These were not well-developed at first, and so choice needed to be offered on a small scale at first, rather than offering big choices such as 'what do you want to learn this term?'

A good staff-student relationship was an essential ingredient to the success of the project.  This was possible because of the small staff-student ratio, and the fact that the staff remained constant through out the length of the project.  Members of staff were committed to getting to know the young people and avoided labelling the young people as 'bad' or 'stupid' for example.  The staff had a 'youth-worker' type approach with the young people, which was somewhere in between being a friend and a teacher. This approach seemed to work well with the young people whose behaviour generally improved through out the year. 

Structuring the day around young people's energy levels meant that there was less likely to be any disruption.  In general the young people were more alert and settled in the morning when the staff tended to give them tasks involving reading and writing.  In the afternoon, when the young people found it harder to focus, more practical activities took place. 

Routine was important as some of the young people did not like suddenly being asked to do something different.  This related to their levels of confidence, for example, the staff planned for the young people to go and give out teas and coffees to a community group.  The young people did not know about this until the day they were expected to do it, and for some of them this was too sudden.  The staff thought that, had they warned the young people in advance, all the young people would have been able to take part in this activity.

Providing the right stretch for the young people helped keep them motivated to do the activities set for them.  Most of the young people liked to work within their comfort zone without being pushed or stretched too much.  This made it a difficult for the staff to get the balance right between challenging the young people enough so that they learnt something, but not intimidating the young people by making the task too hard.  Appearances were significant, for example, a worksheet may have been very easy, but if it looked long and complicated the young people would find it hard to complete it.   

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