- How did you get buy in for First Give across the school and the class teachers delivering the programme?
It is important for us as a school to continually reflect on our school vision and values; Aim High, Be Kind, Model Determination and Have Integrity.
We want our pupils to play a confident, informed role in society, interacting with others in a positive way. The First Give programme offered our pupils the opportunity to connect with their local community, tackle a social injustice issue they felt passionately about alongside developing many key skills that are desired by the top universities and employers. By taking part we knew our pupils would feel success and be celebrated for demonstrating our schools core values in a meaningful way.
Alongside this, the launch event that First Give delivered with the tutor team prior to the programme starting really conveyed to the team that the programme itself is highly structured, well-resourced and has had a lot of success in other schools across the country.
- What tips and suggestions do you have for other Lead Teachers?
My biggest tip would be to devise a MTP from the 8 lessons that First Give provide to suit the needs of your individual school. We delivered the First Give programme through our morning Values & Character curriculum (tutor time) so our sessions were only 25 minutes long. Breaking down the one hour sessions into manageable, clearly defined sessions meant that all tutors knew exactly what the needed to do in each session.
Another suggestion would be to allow each group taking part to have one in school day for social action each and ensure these days don’t clash. Logistically having more than one event on in a day can be very difficult to oversee and lead to competition for numbers between the groups. We had a two-week window in which the different fundraising events took place. These were advertised in advance, which was easy to oversee using a central spreadsheet that tutors filled in.
- What challenges did you face coordinating First Give and how did you overcome them?
Timing was a challenge for us when we got to the designing presentations stage. The power of programme comes from every pupil in the group being involved, every pupil delivering their small group presentations at a class level before the school final, so if you can I would add a few extra sessions in your MTP for this, or have a buffer week before you set the date for the presentation skills workshop.
- How did you support students to complete meaningful social action projects?
My experience is that initially the pupils were keener to focus on fundraising activities rather than raising awareness. And while there were great many ideas that would have raised lots of money, my question to every class group was ‘How does this activity link to your chosen charity?’ If the pupils couldn’t give a clear answer, we didn’t give the activity the go ahead. This forced the pupils to think more deeply about their charity and how they could do something that is useful to them.
Some examples of this included one group who organised a car wash and bake sale. They did this the condition that the customer would take a ten-minute mental health break and reflect on some questions while their car was being washed or they were having a tea break. Another group held a raffle; however, you entered the raffle by completing an online informative quiz about their charity as opposed to paying for a strip of tickets.
