Community Spirit

We celebrated the organisation, responsibility, and team effort of our Year 9 and 10 students who were selected to take part in the prestigious Dame Kelly Holmes Trust programme. The On Track to Achieve for Education is an innovative seven-month school-based mentoring programme in which Athlete Mentors work with groups of young people. The programme helps develop the confidence, emotional resilience, and teamwork of the young people, and enables them to reflect on their own aspirations for the future.

Over the course of the programme, our students have worked with an athlete mentor to achieve their personal goals and targets set for the programme and worked as a team with other young people from within the school and/or in the local community. They have worked on a social action project to make a positive impact locally and our intrepid students chose The Basement Project.

Each week our professional athlete mentor, Kelvin Batey came into school to work with our North team of students. Kelvin's biggest achievements were winning four World BMX titles with the latest being in 2015. He was also British number 1 for eight years consecutively, between 2003 and 2010.

He has worked on delivering the 'TRACK' model looking at Teachability, Responsibility, Aspirations, Character and Knowledge. Working together as a team, one year group chose the Basement Project to collect donations for in order to give something back to the community for the social action part of the scheme. Tins of food, pasta and sanitary products were delivered to the charity and gratefully received. The other year group chose the Blue Cross with a view to donating dog and cat food.

Well done to everyone who took part!