The Working Well programme is the second large-scale partership between Space Unlimited and Paul Hamlyn Foundation. This long term relationship has enabled our work with young people to grow in both scope and impact.
The two year programme spanned across 14 schools in both Glasgow City and South Lanarkshire Councils, working with over 700 young people and over 40 teachers.
• Developing young people's capacity and awareness of themselves as resourceful, resilient, self-directed learners, equipped to adapt to an uncertain future.
• Building young people's confidence and skills to prepare themselves for their own transition into the world of work.
• Encouraging a shift in the way that educators, employers, parents and others work with young people – and with one another – to support higher levels of engagement, achievement and attainment, both in and beyond the school setting.
• Co-designing and testing new processes with programme participants to support lasting systemic change.
We undertook 3 distinct, but connected, strands of work to address these aims, building on our previous programme Changing Schools Together, also funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
• Confident Transitions – to build the skills and confidence of potential early schoolleavers to take responsibility for designing and co-delivering the support they need to transition successfully from formal secondary education into fulfilling employment, training or alternative education.
• Early Experiences – to support 12-14 year olds, as they transition into secondary school, so that they can shape relevant and engaging learning experiences that help them to connect in a meaningful way to the world of work.
• Lasting Change – to build capacity in adult stakeholders to promote system-wide change, recognising that educators, employers, parents and other service providers all have a crucial role to play. In particular, we wanted to build on learning from our 'Changing Schools Together programme' to better understand how we (young people, adults and Space Unlimited) can support lasting change at a whole-school and wider system level.
Hear directly from the young people who participated in the Confident Transitions strand of the programme, in the video below.
We have also published three short reports from the programme, check them out.