“Education changes future prospects”

Homework Club update

We are supporting more than 45 children, with numbers rising, and we are taking on new volunteers even though many of our lockdown heroes are still involved; many are now at university and still actively volunteering in spite of the uncertainty and logistics. We even have one volunteer who logs on from Rio de Janeiro every Monday!

School partnerships

We are delighted by a new partnership which we have formed with Rugby School, who are such an important part of the history of RPT and who are providing two groups of students on Mondays and Wednesdays to tutor the RPT children online as part of their community activities. We continue to work with and are immensely grateful for the support of the American School in London who are also linking their pupils in with our Homework Club online.

Tutoring vs homework support

Children are signing on in greater numbers and these include existing RPT members as well as new families. The children seem to be happy continuing with English and Maths tutoring as oppose to homework support, which we feel is more effective for their overall academic progression and easier to manage online. They are also practising verbal and non-verbal reasoning.

“Education changes future prospects”

When we moved our service online in the spring we began using Atom Learning for Maths and occasionally English.  It allowed the children to complete practice questions individually on the topics covered and, crucially, for the first time, let us monitor and track the children’s progress as can be seen from the case story that follows. 

“Jane* - a polite, extroverted, helpful little girl with the most wonderful smile has been attending RPT since she was five. Always keen to help the grown-up in charge with any task, she also comes from an extremely complicated family background.  Her parents are refugees from a war-torn country and suffered significant trauma. She has a much older sibling who also lives in the house.

I noticed how much Jane liked to spend time with grown-ups. She was keen to work with certain volunteers but schoolwork did not feel like a big priority in her life. She was in Year 4, her mind was elsewhere, and spending time with adults was more appealing than anything else.  When our virtual classroom started in the spring of 2020, Jane was one of the first takers. A brand new laptop was lent, Microsoft Teams downloaded, passwords to educational resources provided, and she was good to go. Initially she was keen to participate but not necessarily focused on the academic part.

Children were also bored at this stage, confined to small spaces and deprived of exterior human contact. The social prospect of moving from one to one support to small groups suddenly became hugely appealing. Jane visibly enjoyed the company of her peers in this context, as well as the volunteers.

As the weeks and months advanced Jane’s engagement with the lessons grew. She asked more questions and ventured more answers, took part in group discussions that included other children. Sure enough, as her confidence grew, so did her individual performance in the practice questions. As a result of Atom’s individual reports, we were able to track Jane’s progress and she is now in Year 5 and performing comfortably above average in both Maths and English (always her stronger subject)."

This may seem insignificant, but the knock-on effect to this young person’s life will be significant. As a service, that is our aim. Education changes people’s outlook, but also, importantly, future prospects.

*name changed to protect privacy.