Using football to tackle the barriers which prevent young people achieving their potential, Football Beyond Borders works to reduce school exclusion and supports young people to achieve their goals.
Impact
- Challenge
School exclusions: excluded children are often the most vulnerable: twice as likely to be in the care of the state, four times more likely to have grown up in poverty, seven times more likely to have a special educational need and 10 times more likely to suffer recognised mental health problems.
- Impact goal
Injustice and structural inequality is challenged and changed
- Priority
Football Beyond Borders targets children at risk of exclusion, and helps them to continue to engage in mainstream education. Using football as a hook for youth engagement, their two-year schools programme works with those presenting challenging behaviour in the first three years of secondary school (Key Stage Three), before the ‘peak’ when they are most likely to be permanently excluded.
Designed around participants’ passion for football, the programme combines a football-themed curriculum (reading, writing, speaking and listening skills) with coaching, whilst fostering teamwork, responsibility and leadership. They are keen to use their knowledge to lobby for more preventative support in schools - showing that, with engagement, it is possible to change the trajectories of "hard-to-reach" young people who are at risk of exclusion.
