The UFA team is delighted to announce the start of an exciting project in the West Midlands to track the impact of Peer Tutoring, specifically focusing on the peer tutors themselves.
Funded by a donation from the Mercer’s Company Charitable Trust, the programme launched last week with two secondary and two primary schools from Walsall and Willenhall.
More than 100 young people across both primary and secondary phase will take part with approximately sixty per cent of the young people taking part receiving Pupil Premium. The peer tutors will potentially be drawn from years 5 to 12 with one of the schools considering how peer tutors can start as young as Year One. UFA is partnering with West Walsall and Willenhall E-ACT Academies, Reedswood Primary EACT Academy and Victoria Park Primary Academy for the project.
The project launched with a specially designed lead practitioner training last week, with direct delivery to young people planned in schools in November. The project includes training the children and young people directly so UFA can model the training for school staff who will then go onto train other peer tutors themselves. This unique approach allows staff to build their expertise too, so that they can embed the development beyond the initial project.
Peer Tutoring (where an older pupil supports a younger member of school community in areas such as literacy) has been shown to improve outcomes for the supported pupil (evidenced by the Sutton Trust.) But our experience is that Peer Tutoring also has a significant impact on the Peer Tutor. This project will explore this. Initial evidence suggests that taking on such a position of responsibility and leadership helps engagement with learning through building a positive mindset and thus impacts positively on ‘character’ development. The project will evaluate the impact of the experience in terms of traditional academic measures and against UFA’s own leadership characteristics.
The schools and the young people’s journey will be tracked not only through evaluation by both UFA and the school, but their experience will also be captured on camera by a film maker on behalf of the UFA.
It’s a project the UFA team is incredibly excited about and we would like to thank the Mercer’s Charitable Trust for their support, as well as the schools, their staff and most importantly the young people who will be taking part. We look forward to reporting back on how the project progresses.