Essential Skills for Lambeth's Youth Community

Celebrating a year of achievement with Ark Evelyn Grace Academy students

Spiral Skills partnered with Evelyn Grace Academy for a year of activity designed to develop essential skills, improve employment pathways and empower year 10 students.

Our Engage Programme is a ten-session program consisting of interactive workshops designed to develop essential skills and a growth mindset. Our mission was to grow students’ ability to communicate confidently, establish trusted relationships and encourage openness to new challenges. Workshops throughout the program also focus on supporting young people to engage with their future pathways, understand their needs and areas to improve, and connect them to an exciting network of professionals to help raise their aspirations and inform their decision-making. 

Some highlight sessions across our program included ice-breaking teamwork challenges, a problem-solving construction challenge, and trading games that challenge their negotiating skills. The students excelled in these challenges, especially Najet, who was very engaged throughout. He put his best foot forward in every activity, displaying excellent resilience in challenging activities. Support facilitator Jacob was particularly impressed by the cohort’s teamwork skills, commenting, ‘they were all really engaged, thought outside the box, and their skills really shined.’ 

The Engage programme ended with an exciting three-day work experience programme. Students joined us at Brixton Village Studios to meet creative agency John Doe, who supported them in designing their own PR campaign. Day two was our enterprise challenge, where students designed and sold their own branded t-shirts in Pop Brixton. Our students were then invited to undertake micro work experience placements across Pop Brixton's vendors, including Share A Slice, Jollof House Kitchen, Mo Suvlaky, Halo Burger and Reprezent Radio, alongside local restaurant En Root. On the final day, we were joined by Blue Array who delivered an SEO masterclass before students were tasked to use their new analytical skills on Spiral's future website. 

“I would like to take a moment to thank you all for your time. A lot of work goes into planning a meaningful work experience, and Evelyn Grace Academy staff and students appreciate you facilitating activities, imparting knowledge and engaging the development of skills that can be used in years to come. Students returned from work experience excited and empowered. Many of them wanted to continue their placement for longer and all feedback on how much they enjoyed it and how much they had learned. This positive outcome would not have been possible without you and I hope to work with you in future.”

Selina Case - Careers Lead

To wrap up an exciting year of work with Ark Evelyn Grace Year 10’s, Spiral Skills had the opportunity to deliver a career day with 130 students. Following their exam period, we invited 20 partner organizations to showcase their employment and training opportunities.  

Our guest organizations included Kingston University, South Bank Colleges, ADA College, La Retraite, Child-Friendly Lambeth, London South Bank University, Found by Few, Orange Bow, Youth Beyond Borders, ML Community Enterprise, Chips Peace, Step Now, Raw Music Media, Ripe Learning, Lambeth Made, Exceed Reading Stars, Building Young Brixton, The Crystal Palace Foundation and Street Soccer.

We would like to extend our congratulations to all our year 10s for their achievements across 2023. It was a pleasure to see them develop across our programme of activities. Here are a few of their highlights. 

“ My favourite part was the work experience and selling t-shirts. It really developed my public speaking skills, especially bargaining with the general public. I felt like I was more eloquent in Spiral than I was anywhere else.” - Kareem, Year 10 Student. 

“ My highlight was meeting new faces; I love the opportunity to interact with new people and improve my communication skills”, Najet, Year 10 Student. 

Working with Ark Evelyn Grace Academy and seeing their students excel has been a pleasure. Thank you to all of our opportunity partners who joined our mission along the way. If you would like to learn more about how Spiral Skills programmes can help develop, connect and empower your students, contact us at opportunitie@spiralskills.co.uk