Charity Insights

Final week at the Brilliant Club: Interview with David Jones

My final post is an interview with David Jones, the Teaching and Learning Manager of The Scholars Programme. David’s first job after university was for a charity which runs low cost Saturday schools. He then trained to be a teacher and taught in a primary school in South London. David left the classroom with the intention of working for an educational organisation which turned out to be The Brilliant Club.

 

How did the Scholars Programme come about and how is it run? 

The Scholars Programme came about from the work of two teachers – Jonathan Sobczyk and Simon Coyle who participated in the Teach First training programme. They spotted that within the classes they taught, there were pupils capable of going to highly selective universities, but weren’t doing so. The charity’s overall mission is to mobilise the PhD researcher community to tackle the issue of fair access to highly selective universities. The charity now runs two programmes – Researchers in Schools which is a teacher training route for PhD graduates and The Scholars Programme. Through The Scholars Programme, we recruit, train and place PhD researches in non-selective state schools to deliver university style tutorials.

 

What are the biggest challenges of running the programme? 

The biggest challenges tend to be around the logistics, such as matching up the availability of tutors and schools. For the pupils, the programme is a challenging experience as the work they are required to complete is pitched at a key stage above one they are currently in, and pupils are also required to produce an extended final assignment. Running the programme in areas rural and coastal areas is a bigger challenge, as the distances that people have to travel to get to the schools becomes much greater.

 

What direction is The Scholars Programme heading in?

We are excited to expand the programme to Wales – we now work across the whole of England which we are very proud of, as it is not just an urban programme. We worked with over 8500 pupils last year and we are setting ourselves the challenge of taking in a bigger cohort of students.

 

Do you monitor the destinations of students who participated in the programme?

Historically, this isn’t something we’ve been able to do in a systematic way. We know pupils who have completed the programme and gone on to study at highly selective universities such as Oxbridge and LSE. However, this is an area that we are currently trying to improve through the newly formed Monitoring and Evaluation department. One of the tools we are going to use is the Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) which is going to be available to third sector organisations in 2017. HEAT is a national database that universities currently use to track all their outreach activities. This will allow us to see the destinations of the pupils that we work with in a more systematic way. The tracker will also allow us to investigate the effectiveness of sustained interventions over time.

 

Why is charity work appealing to you?

I don’t think it’s right that the school you go to, or the background that you are from should limit or advantage your opportunities. The statistics clearly show that people who have been to independent schools are overrepresented at highly selective universities and in a number of professions. I am motivated by ensuring that all pupils have the same opportunities and succeed on the basis of their ability, determination and their choices.

The best part of the job is going to the graduations to see pupils that completed the programme; hearing them talk about what they learnt, challenges they overcame and seeing how proud their parents are of them.

Final words

It was an absolute pleasure to work at The Brilliant Club for 4 weeks. It was inspiring to see the hard work that goes into running social mobility programmes and it is an area I am considering as a potential career. I would like to thank The Brilliant Club and the Charity Insights Programme for this fantastic opportunity, which enabled me to develop a wide range of transferable skills.

Read Final week at The Brilliant Club in full

Weeks 2 and 3 of my placement

I’ve developed a wide range of skills during the second week at the Brilliant Club. My supervisor was away and has left me a list of tasks to complete that week. This has greatly aided the development of my time management, organisational and written communication skills as I was required to work independently and correspond with participants of the programme, which gave me a great insight into what working for a charity is really like. 

During Weeks 2 and 3, I’ve continued my research into social mobility which is becoming more and more interesting, as I begin to draw links between different publications. In my last week’s post, I mentioned a government issued report, which highlighted London as a huge social mobility hotspot, however after looking at the participation in local areas data released by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, I now know that despite London being a social mobility hot spot, there are areas in the South West and East London where higher education participation is still very low. 

This week I’ve read a research paper by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on widening participation in higher education, combining the data published by many different organisations. One of the most interesting things I found out is that the difference in higher education participation between students from disadvantaged backgrounds arises before entry into higher education, as is mostly due to long term consequences of disadvantaged students underachieving in secondary school, as opposed to students choosing not to attend university despite having the opportunity to do so. Therefore, it has been suggested that to overcome this problem, secondary school students should be targeted by social mobility programmes to ensure that they do not underachieve during their time at school. This particular problem is the aim of the Scholars Programme which I mentioned in my introductory post, as the programme supports the academic development of students from Year 6 to Year 12 thus widening access to higher education, which will be the focus of my next blog post.

I can’t believe the last 3 weeks passed so quickly!

Read Weeks 2 and 3 at the Brilliant Club in full

During my four-week placement I will be working at the Brilliant Club, a charity which focuses on widening the participation of students from disadvantaged backgrounds at highly-selective universities. The charity runs a successful Scholars Programme which helps students to secure places at university by organising tutorials with PhD tutors for small groups of Year 6 to Year 12 students.

The charity is also in charge of running the Nuffield Research Placement in Greater London and Surrey which is the programme I am working on. The programme provides Year 12 students with the opportunity to complete a summer research placement in a STEM field thus enabling them to gain extremely valuable skills and experience, thus aiding them with their university application as well as equipping them with core competencies of a successful scientist.The scheme encourages applications from students with no family history of going to university, as well as those who attend schools in less well-off areas therefore the scheme greatly supports the idea of social mobility which I am greatly passionate about.

The reason why I’ve picked the Nuffield Research Placement scheme is because I completed a Nuffield Research placement at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre located in the Hammersmith Campus of Imperial College in the summer of 2014. The placement has greatly influenced both my university as well as course choices – it’s one of the main reasons why I’ve decided to apply to Imperial. Having experienced the great impact of the scheme myself, I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to see what the programme looks like from the other perspective whilst examining what social mobility is, what makes a successful social mobility scheme and what we can do to ensure to make such schemes even more effective, especially in the long term.

My first week

During the first week of my placement, I’ve focused on researching social mobility and looking at various social mobility related statistics which I will discuss later on, as well as seeing what running the programme for London and Surrey area entails. On my first day, we have visited students currently completing a placement at University of East London which has been designed to enable the students to develop key skills through independently carrying out research on a rapidly progressing area of science such as nanotechnology which will be of great help at university and beyond.

I’ve started my research on social mobility by reading a government issued report on the Social Mobility index, which looks at how well students from disadvantaged backgrounds do at school, and if they succeed later on in life. The educational attainment and outcomes achieved by adults serve as indicators of the extent of social mobility in the area, thus enabling the social mobility hot spots and cold spots to be identified. However, despite there being social mobility hot spots such as London, there is still a lot of work to be done to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially from areas where opportunities are not within reach, in securing places at university, good jobs and throughout their studies, which I will discuss in detail in my upcoming blog posts.

Read My first week at The Brilliant Club in full