We are so grateful to all of you who donated this year! Coupled with emergency funding due to COVID19 and some generous grants, acet UK has been able to reach even more young people in this academic year than we did last year, despite the challenges of lockdown and school closures!
2,365 young people in London took part in engaging relationships and sex education to support them in achieving better health outcomes. Evaluation of the lessons through feedback forms showed that the students increased their knowledge, developed their relational skills, and changed negative attitudes as a result of our interaction with them.
For example, 64 Year 10 boys had a lesson with us about the impact of pornography. Afterwards, 100% of the boys said they were more aware of the issues surrounding pornography and one told us that, as a result of the lesson, he had told a friend to “stop watching porn!" We are thrilled that the young people we teach are sharing important messages with their peers as a direct result of what they learn through the Esteem programme.
With no in-person access to students in the summer term due to lockdown, we swiftly adapted our lessons for online delivery. Sadly, due to the poverty and deprivation in Southwark where most of our schools work is carried out, many students did not have suitable devices at home to be able to access the sessions. We were, however, able to provide 294 students in Westminster with online lessons during this time., which is fantastic news!
Our Esteem network who are trained and supported by our team continues to grow. There are now 192 educators in the network who together reached 37,995 young people in the 2019-2020 academic year!
Other students had the following to say about the lessons:
We also ask teachers for their feedback. They often tell us that they have learnt new things from our lessons even as adults! Here is some feedback:
We usually carry out a detailed impact analysis in the summer term, running focus groups to determine the difference the Esteem lessons have made to students who have received our sessions over the course of 4 years from Year 7 to Year 10.
We were unable to carry this out fully this year because of lockdown, but we did run a focus group at one school in the Spring term where we gathered some information from Year 10 students who we have taught for 4 years. It was so encouraging to hear their perspectives on the Esteem programme. Here are some of their comments:
The impact of lockdown
Lockdown, of course, had a huge impact on our schools work. With no direct access to students, we had to swiftly adapt our lessons to suit online delivery. Sadly, due to the poverty and deprivation in the areas of Southwark where most of our schools work is carried out, many school children did not have suitable devices at home to be able to access the sessions.
We were, therefore, only able to reach 27 young people in Southwark with online delivery during the summer term. We were, however, able to provide 294 students at a school in Westminster with online lessons during this time. The Head Of Life Skills said about one of our online sessions:
"This online zoom session has been the best out of all the other external online lessons that have delivered at our school so far since we went online due to COVID-19. The lesson went well and the girls were a lot more engaged than I expected. them to be. As always, an excellent lesson."
We set ourselves up to be able to run live video link lessons to schools from September. This means that we can either teach in person, depending on the situation at the time, or can teach through the video link if external educators are not allowed into school due to restrictions.