At Northampton Town Community Trust, we try to help local businesses stay connected to our schools and their communities.
Businesses are often keen to come to us as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility strategy to give back to their communities. In the current climate, families and their children not only need support, but schools and their frontline staff face major pressures in keeping children in education whilst maintaining their engagement in learning.
Back in January 2020, we began our relationship with Digital Advance Control, setting outcomes to support local children in schools. This linked to our organisational strategy to Improve Health & Wellbeing, create Stronger Safer Connected Communities and Enhance Life Opportunities. We ran this over a two-year period, which continued during the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns, working with key worker children who still attended school. Following early success, the programme was stretched wider to reach more schools and pupils for the academic year of 2020/21. Schools embraced the programme, and saw the impact it had on their students, leading to an extended provision which would not have been possible about with support from Digital Advance Control.
The programme involved our Education & Sports Mentors working in Daventry Schools delivering the NTFC Community Trust's Primary Stars programme for one day a week covering activities such as wellbeing check ins, PSHE group sessions, one to one mentoring, Reading Stars for targeted pupils, lunchtime animation activities and after school clubs.
Each school we worked with set up three key outcomes for our Education & Sports Mentors to achieve over the academic year measured through pupil surveys and school assessments (linked to academic progress and attendance). Questions were then asked to the pupils about what they had been learning and how they found the programme. As the programme and school engagement grew over 2021, we were able to identify more schools to be part of the provision through the funding Digital Advance Control had supported us with.
Damon Fox –Business Development Manager at the Northampton Town Community Trust said:
"It’s great to have a partner like Digital Advance Control who see the value of what our Primary School Programme and Education Sports Mentors can have within schools and the impact on pupils engagement to learning & attendance. They really understood the vital role a Community Trust programme can have and how this could be spread far across the children and young people of Daventry."
The schools supported through the Primary Stars Programme are Monksmoor Park Primary, DSLV (Danetre And Southbrook Learning Village) reaching up to 500 pupils.
For more information on our school’s programme, a visit from Clarence or ways in which your school can become a partner school please email damon.fox@ntfc.co.uk
For more updates follow @NTFC_CT on Twitter while details on Digital Advance Control can be found at dac-group.co.uk