CARAF CENTRE UPDATE, September 2015-March 2016
The CarAf Centre continued to offer services to the local community, including the Mandela Supplementary School, running classes on Saturdays 10am-1.15pm and Tuesday evenings 4.30pm-7.20pm during term-time; the Sunshine Day Nursery five days per week, and its educational advocacy service. Notable highlights in the period have included
- In the period 22 children were booked to attend the nursery for the new school year. The children and parents were engaged in a range of activities including the nursery Christmas celebration and presentation of a gifts for each child.
- The education advocacy service helped about 35 families in the period January to December 2015, exceeding its target for the period by over 16%.
- In November, the CarAf Education service held a workshop on Children and Social Media, looking at the impact social media has on the mental health and well-being of young people, as well as risks and opportunities parents ought to be made aware of. Thirteen parents attended the workshop, which benefitted from great participation from the attendees; and the feedback obtained was excellent, with some of the comments from participants including:-
“I have better knowledge of various social media sites”.
“The workshop was great and we were encouraged to participate openly”.
“The workshop was really stimulating and exciting”
“The sharing of thoughts with other parents was great”
“It would be good to have a follow up session”
“Comfortable setting”. … Nice to hear other parent’s views”
- 24 children were registered in attendance at the Mandela School (for the new school year beginning in September 2015), which succeeded in March 2015 in revalidating the Gold Award (quality standard for supplementary schools) that it first attained in 2010 from the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education.
- In a new development, the Caraf Centre educational advocacy service has recently been working with the Somali Development Trust, providing training in the basics of educational advocacy, thereby empowering members of that community in reducing the level of school exclusions among Somali pupils. This initiative, which arose out of a meeting of the local refugee forum, has provided a valuable model of intervention which can be extended in future in assisting and empowering other communities in the borough in tackling the problem of pupil exclusions from school.
