Happy Holidays!

Young people using computers

By Tony, Learning and Policy Manager

Most teachers look forward to a rest over the Easter holidays, but that’s not necessarily the case for those here at KRAN. Several of our teaching team keep working and actually pull off quite a feat: a KRAN holiday programme.

“Why?” is the first question you might ask. Well, KRAN’s Learning for Life programme works with young, unaccompanied refugees and asylum seekers, especially those who arrived comparatively recently and are new in the community, so not yet enrolled in mainstream schools or colleges.

Many of these young people lack the social networks and connections that citizen-children have, so can often find themselves at a loose end and a bit isolated during school holidays. It’s for this reason that we aim to put on a holiday programme that’s different to what we do in term time – we aim for something a bit less academic and a bit more fun consisting of a mix of classroom days and daytrips, as well as other social and sporting activities.

For this holiday, we were lucky enough to have the fantastic support of Canterbury Academy, so for the “classroom” days, we decamped – lock, stock and barrel – to the Academy’s modern and very impressive facilities. Its high-quality and spacious premises meant that we were able to invite our students from all three sites – our Canterbury hub, our groups that run inside Canterbury College, and our Folkestone hub. This provided a chance for friendships to be rekindled and new connections to be made. It’s the second time that Canterbury Academy has been kind enough to allow us to make use of the premises during school holidays, and this time round we used classrooms, art rooms, an IT suite, a drama room and the playing fields

During our days at the Academy, our learners got a real feel for what it might be like to attend mainstream education, while at the same time doing lots of new things that kept their motivation and interest piqued. There were singing and circle games in the drama room; some language practice in the classroom using “bitpaper” and a ceiling-mounted projector (we don’t have anything like that at KRAN!); and some clever combination of maths and art with parabolic curves … and that was just for starters.

Ahead of a trip to Wildwood Trust in Herne, we did some classroom work about animals and conservation and then – in a first for several of our students – we went into a computer lab and made Powerpoint slides about our favourite animals. All of this was interspersed with bouts of cricket, football, volleyball and frisbee, and one day we all went to see the latest Super Mario Bros film at the Carlton Cinema in Westgate. On some days we had up to 30 young people taking part, compared to about 10 in term time.

Reflecting at the end of the successful two-week programme, we all recognise that there’s no way we could have pulled it off without our brilliant team of helpers. These helpers are part-time KRAN staff who themselves are young people with similar lived experience. They speak our students’ languages and have a deep understanding of their circumstances.

They are role models and a source of inspiration for our students (and our staff!), and they all went the extra mile to make this holiday programme so welcoming and rewarding … so thank you to Bushra, Djafarou, Dunia, Grmalem, Obaida, Osama, Rishan, Shahab and Yousef!

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