Full Potential

City Year London

Education matters most for Luke.

By Sophie Livingstone, CEO City Year London

The fact that family background is the strongest determinant of a child’s future happiness, health and wealth is a depressing indictment for a progressive nation like ours.

Britain is a land of huge opportunity and yet it’s still the case that if you are born into poverty, you are more likely to die in poverty, than you are to escape it.

Education is what matters most.  The precious time spent in the classroom engaged in the process of teaching, mentoring and learning, simply transforms futures like nothing else can. 

The way we are brought up, the people that influence our values, our aspirations, our respect for others, our attitudes to learning and life, are critical.

For too many children, school is a tragic succession of missed opportunities and unrealised potential.

A famous study following children born in 1970 found that by age 10, a child with a low social economic status, but with an upper quartile cognitive development score at age two, will have fallen behind their peers from wealthier homes that started with a lower quartile score.

In other words, bright children from poor homes fall behind less-bright children from wealthy homes before their tenth birthday.

Education inequalities such as not having access to books or lacking the right role models to help answer questions outside school, has a devastating impact over a whole life-span, not just in childhood.

There is indisputable evidence to show that children with access to a good education earn more, remain healthier, commit fewer crimes, live longer and generally contribute more to the social and economic wellbeing of the country.

At City Year, our aim is to tackle this inequality head on by working in schools like the one Luke attends.

We recruit 18-25 year olds who dedicate a year of voluntary service to work in schools as role models, mentors and tutors of after-school programmes.  As ‘near-peers’, the volunteers provide classroom support and mentoring to help children improve their attendance, attitude and curriculum performance.

Our volunteers are in school early to help children become ‘ready to learn’.  We welcome children at the school gates, eat breakfast with them, play games, run exercise warm-ups to get the blood flowing, or simply act as a friendly adult for children to talk to at the start of the day.  For some children, daily interaction with a City Year volunteer is the most reliable and consistent contact with an adult in their lives.

We work in partnership with teachers to support children’s learning through problem solving and building children’s competence to learn.  We provide extra resource to focus on literacy and numeracy so children like Luke can receive more intensive personal help with the basic building blocks to future learning.

Building a healthy school atmosphere is an important part of what we do.  Children report feeling ‘safer’ with City Year people around which can be a good first step towards building self confidence and consequently engagement with learning and good behaviour. 

Luke is clearly bright with aspirations of going to university and training to become a vet.  The role models that Luke encounters in his next few years will be absolutely critical in whether he achieves his dreams, or becomes another case study of missed opportunity.

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