Training Update

28 June 2021

Firstly, everyone at Berkshire Youth would like to wish Kate Armitage, our Training and Volunteer Development Manager, our very best wishes as she begins her maternity leave. Kate’s last working day will be this Friday, 2 July.

Fit4Youth
The training team have been busy this half term delivering Fit4Youth across west Berkshire Primary schools. A total of 210 children have taken part in these sessions over three primary schools and they have reported that they have really enjoyed the sessions and learnt a lot!

Topics covered over the last few months have been:

• What is a healthy lifestyle?
• What is a portion size?
• I spy a food label
• Food factory
• Shine bright like a diamond
• Every minute counts
• Where the germs lurk

Leadership Programme
Katie has been busy delivering the Leadership Programme to 20 students at Theale Green and Denefield School over the past few months. These programmes have been delivered over a blended approach with some face to face sessions and some sessions being delivered online. All students are working towards their Level One in Leadership Development. The students have started to report an increase in their confidence and leadership skills during over the last few weeks and they are gearing up to run a number of leadership activities with their peers over the coming weeks.

Newbury Event
As part of our aim to support local councils and community groups to enhance young people’s voice, we supported Newbury Town Council with their ‘Ask a Young Person’ event on Thursday 17 June. This session attracted a number of young people across different schools who wanted to get their voices heard about how to improve Newbury for young people. The conversations were so insightful and ideas will be taken back to Newbury Town Council for discussion.

The young people were really excited to hear about the developments at the Waterside Centre and were so pleased that they will have a dedicated space to hang out with their friends and try new activities.

Reading University – Reading Scholars
Berkshire Youth have been working closely with the University of Reading to devise some training for their mentors as part of the Reading Scholars programme. With the support of our incredible youth workers, Paige and Kelly, we successfully delivered two training programmes in June to 40 mentors. The topics of these training sessions were:

• Relationship building in youth work
• Professional boundaries in youth work

We received some brilliant feedback from attendees and hope to continue this relationship with the University of Reading in the new academic year.

Here’s some of the positive feedback received:

• I really enjoyed the open conversations and opportunity to share experiences and learning what others have done in various situations.
• I enjoyed the discussions, they were well structured and interactive
• The friendliness of the people running the session, the fact that we all had to have cameras on. It was very useful to hear everyone’s ideas!
• Engaging and talking about our different experiences as mentors, both our struggles as well as the benefits for each of us of online versus face-to-face mentoring