It’s been a busy, exciting and rewarding autumn term here at Jacari. Our main focus has been on recruiting more volunteers to tutor children and young people who use EAL in Bristol and Oxford but we’ve also started some new initiatives in both cities and organised some fun extracurricular activities and trips for the children and young people we support.
Recruiting volunteers
At the start of term, we attended freshers’ events at four universities and met lots of students interested in tutoring. We’ve also had the support of university departments, such as Education and Refugee Studies, who helped us share information about volunteering as a Jacari tutor with their students.
As a result, we’ve had lots of new applications and our Coordinators have been busy doing DBS checks and running training workshops for our new volunteers. They’ve also been liaising with our 20 partner schools, taking new pupil referrals and matching them to volunteers. By the end of the term 117 children and young people were matched to a volunteer and receiving tuition. And we're so pleased to tell you that our volunteers delivered 361 hours of tutoring in the autumn term!
One of the highlights of this term has been meeting all our volunteers face-to-face at our teaching skills workshops (after two years of doing training online!). We’ve also organised some additional training sessions for volunteers, including a workshop on issues faced by EAL learners which we held at Trinity College Oxford, and a session on using games as a learning tool for Bristol volunteers.
New projects
In Bristol, we launched a brand new peer tutoring project, where A-level students at Montpelier High School are tutoring and mentoring younger EAL pupils at the school who are all refugees newly arrived from countries like Ukraine and Afghanistan. We worked closely with the school to identify the peer tutors and run a training workshop and an introduction session to help them get to know their tutees. We're really excited about the impact of this new project and hope to replicate it in other high schools next year.
In Oxford, we’ve started in-school tutoring at four primary schools, which is something we’ve been doing successfully in Bristol for a number of years. We’ve had a great response from EAL leads and teachers at the schools who have helped us set up the sessions. Groups of volunteers are going to the schools for an hour a week at the end of the school day and running fun tutoring sessions for EAL pupils. This will run alongside our established home-tutoring programme.
Extracurricular activities
We’ve arranged three extracurricular activities and trips this term. In Bristol, we took a group of pupils from one of our partner schools, Bannerman Road Community Academy, to a theatre show and drama workshop run by Spilt Ink Theatre Company at The Trinity Centre.
We also had fun Christmas baking session at the Coexist Community Kitchen - where we plan to hold regular cooking workshops for our pupils.
In Oxford, we organised our annual ice-skating trip for pupils, their families and volunteers.
Autumn term 2022 in numbers
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