This initiative, which only started in September 2023, supports Widening Participation at the SoE, through its role in empowering and supporting prospective students from underrepresented backgrounds to access university. However, the project has been many years in the making.
Ilyass Kudiyirickal and I first met at Cotham School in 2015 where he was a lab technician with a Masters in Engineering and dreams of becoming a teacher and I was a Science teacher with dreams of becoming a lecturer! We shared the concern that young people from marginalised communities from areas such as East Bristol, were being left behind and needed extra support to fulfill their education potential. Soon after Ilyas completed his PGCE at the SoE and began teaching in Bristol, he set up after hours tutoring and helping people in his community to apply for university places.
In 2022 Ilyass and I discussed some of the post-pandemic changes in the Somali community, such as a sharp increase in the number of students dropping out of A-level courses, poor GCSE results and increasing rates of crime. Although Ilyas is well known for his work within this community and had a waiting list of young people wanting support, he was unable to support large groups due to space constrictions when working from home. Barton Hill’s micro-campus seemed like the perfect place to offer targeted support for young people and their families. With some fortuitous timing of Widening Participation support from Jules Godfrey and Nick Young from the Civic Team, things started to move quickly. Rosie Hunt (English PGCE tutor) has also been amazing in contributing her time, expertise and enthusiasm towards the project since September.
Building on the amazing work of the micro-campus’s Little Library, the local community has also become involved to a scale previously not seen at the micro-campus. Habby Salaben manages the administration, feedback, social media and parent liaison for the project and tells me that families and wider community are essential to the success of the programme. She also has stories of small but profound successes in terms of families feeling supported and becoming more integrated into community through their children’s involvement in the programme. Ilyass reports, “The collaboration between Power Education and the University of Bristol is reaping significant rewards, not just for the individual students attending tutoring, but for the community as a whole.”
January 2024 has seen an additional input that compliments the weekly tutoring. Experts from the wider STEM community are bringing seminars and projects to the micro-campus for the students to engage with and learn from. The University’s robotics specialists ran a superb session last week and before that the SS Great Britain representatives turned up in force. There are further planned engagement opportunities on psychology, neuroscience and molecular chemistry this term. We believe that these activities will build science and cultural capital for the young people who attend as well as being great fun!
The future of this initiative looks bright. Pupil’s attainment and attitudes to learning are already improving and we now have a strategic plan that involves widening the tutoring base to include Key Stage 5 science, maths and English. Additionally, the planned UoB buildings in Temple Quarter may offer an opportunity to expand to a wider audience in the future. Our dream is to continue supporting young people from similarly marginalised Bristol communities towards better engagement with education. Maybe we will see some of these young people studying at the SoE in a few years!
Simon Neville
Widening Participation