Support for Afghan people arriving in the UK on the ARAP scheme Most of our efforts during March, April and the first half of May were focussed on delivering extension activities for a National Lottery funded project to support newly arrived Afghan families at a Leicestershire MoD base where up to 200 people were arriving weekly. We set up an extensive volunteer delivered English language and literacy teaching programme for women and children at the base, offering practical spoken language at all levels (differentiated teaching for groups of up to 50 women in one room, and up to 20 school aged children). We were also teaching literacy for non-literate women and children of all ages, and some simple maths for children and adults. During this time we created a first edition of our ‘Practise Your English’ series, both for adults and a separate book for children and young people. We recorded new translated video content to support the content in the book. This was user tested extensively by families living at the base, and redrafted according to their feedback. We also translated a positive psychology/peer coaching activity booklet into Dari and Pashto, and used this with Afghan women who didn’t speak or write English to support them to reflect on wellbeing and future planning strategies. We trained 12 volunteers to help with teaching the Practise Your English curriculum and worked closely with MoD staff on site to assist with leading wellbeing activities such as crafts, sports and games. We completed the support project when Mears were commissioned to deliver a wrap around support service for all residents, including language and literacy tuition. Police and Crime Commissioners' Community Fund – resource evaluation project- We continued our focus on resource development and impact evaluation by getting our extended new editions of Practise Your English (adult and for young people) translated and designed into all 13 of the most common refugee languages. We also worked with Curiosity Works to get their wellbeing Amiko cards translated and pilot workshops in a range of refugee/asylum seeker settings using them in combination with the coaching activities booklet. Formal evaluation of our resources was supported by a grant from the LLRPCC Community Fund. This enabled us to work with Leicestershire County Council Virtual School and UASC team, visiting residential settings for UASC young people, speaking with foster carers, and getting invaluable feedback on potential applications and needs in this sector. We worked closely with staff from regional Strategic Migration Partnerships in our area and others to learn more about ESOL in the community and how best to help meet needs in this area. We also worked closely with Leicester City of Sanctuary teachers and other volunteers to establish how best to work in a multi-lingual informal teaching and support environment. All this learning was channelled back into case studies and first steps to building a teacher training programme for volunteer ESOL teachers to go with our Practise Your English translated series. LDS charity funded the Asylum Hotel outreach project- We worked closely with members of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-day Saints from our county, training volunteers to take our resources (with printing funded by LDS charities) into 7 local hotels. This project allowed us to check how useful the resources were when given directly to people residing in hotels. It also allowed us to further experiment with training approaches for volunteers new to the sector, better understanding their concerns and knowledge/skill gaps. This project led directly to a scaled-up project we are currently developing with a sponsor who wishes to remain anonymous, to gift our Practice Your English books to residents in 63 hotels across several regions.

Our resource evaluation project (see above) and Lottery project involved extensive consultation with stakeholders, including focus groups, demonstration workshops with informal and formal feedback from participants, interviews with volunteers and paid staff, co-creation meetings with local authority staff and SMP officers and managers, visits to run discovery sessions with SERCO AS hotel staff, working with social service teams and teachers in schools to better understand need there. This year was especially focused on learning from stakeholder consultation and engagement to make sure our approaches were fully fit for purpose.

No remuneration was received

No transfer of assets other than for full consideration