Blackpool FC Community Trust column: Helping youngsters to fulfil academic achievements

This is delivered under the umbrella of our ‘PL Inspires’ programme, which focuses on supporting and mentoring pupils, who are identified by the schools as needing some additional help.

Our team has been supporting our schools through face-to-face delivery since early September and the impact has been immense.

In addition to this, we also continued with our ‘Alternate Education’ offer.

That allows pupils from local schools to spend a day every week at the stadium to learn with our teachers and study a BTEC level two in sports coaching.

This is done with three local secondary schools, helping to inspire some of their students to engage with school as well as refocus their attention.

While the team has been doing a fantastic job delivering these services of support in our schools, we have also been developing new provisions and will begin new services in local secondary schools very soon.

Our focus has been on local needs and how we can help further, and we’ll release all the details very soon.

It’s hard for me to avoid writing about them yet because they are extremely exciting – but we are currently completing contracts.

Our traineeship team has also this week completed our first programme to engage young people aged 16-24 that are not in education or employment into education and work experience, with the end goal of getting into employment.

The first started in September, and from the 20 young people engaged in the programme, 60 per cent have progressed into a positive employment opportunity so far.

Ninety per cent said they felt more confident from the start of the programme and everyone passed their first aid at work, digital skills course and health and safety qualifications.

They also sat Maths and English Functional Skills exams, but while we suspect an approximate 80 per cent success rate, we won’t have confirmed results until mid-December.

When gaining feedback at the end of the course, all of the trainees rated the programme at nine or above out of 10 and would recommend the programme to their family and friends.

That is another example of the huge impact which the Trust is having on our community.

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