Creating strong foundations: focusing on key developmental areas

If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that a strong foundation centered on skills, relationships and wellbeing is the best gift we can give to any child, which is why all of our programmes are built around these three areas of support.

To support children and young people in building skills, we resumed our partnership with the AQA team delivering short courses in which children and young people can gain a certificate in a whole variety of experiences. Though not a formal qualification they can build their skills, confidence and demonstrate their ability to learn to future colleges, schools and employers. Over 130 awards were completed in a wide range of areas, such as basketball, tennis, emotional awareness, digital music creation, introduction to computers, basic pool skills and how to start a conversation.

We have already begun assessing this year's achievements, with over 20 AQAs being completed during the summer at our P3 Play Centre at Avondale Primary School.

To continue our legacy of building skills in the creative arts, we will be launching a new partnership with Beats who will work with a cohort of 20 young people aged 16-18 through interactive workshops and masterclasses that will culminate in the young people designing and executing a Beats marketing campaign.

To continue our work in supporting children and young people to develop their wellbeing, we have secured support from RBKC's Child and Adult Mental Health Services (CAMHS), who are providing support to parents/carers and their children in our Magic Mums sessions, supporting the whole family unit to be happy and healthy.

Wellbeing is also central to our Man Cave boys-only nights and our Project Athena girls-only sessions, where we talk about explicitly about mental health and how to look after one's own wellbeing.

In response to requests from the children and young people, we have been increasing our cooking and food provision across our services with provision supported by Eat Club (funded by Grove Trust in partnership with the North Kensington Youth Collective) and will resume our cooking sessions with Change4Life.

Volunteers play a key role in supporting us to help children and young people to build positive relationships.We have over 100 volunteers who work across our services, doing everything from mentoring, to supporting children in Homework Club, organising arts and crafts activities, giving talks and much, much more. It's incredibly important that children are exposed to many different adults and young people who can model positive behaviours, helping the children to develop their own positive habits.