Bristol Achieve is a south Bristol-based community interest company that supports high potential year 7 students from a disadvantaged background to great outcomes. Our activities are all based on developing soft skills such as oracy, confidence and communication as well as really nourishing a love of reading for pleasure. Through a strong partnership with the business community in Bristol, currently PricewaterhouseCooper and BITC(business in the community), we train up sixth form students in the art and skill of excellent mentoring allowing our mentors to deliver powerful inter-generational mentoring sessions on a weekly basis. Once our group of mentees have been mentored for 9 weeks we will then give them the chance to take on a ‘challenge event’ which will see them speaking in a short interview with a member of the school’s leadership team, possibly the head. This lays the foundation for them to succeed at challenges that will require strong confidence, resilience and oracy skills in the future in areas such as exams, presentations and interviews.
We are working with Dr. Verity Jones and Dr Ciaran Burke from the department of education at UWE to evaluate the impact of our mentoring for both mentors and mentees, and hope to share our findings in 2022.
We would require you to write us one grant application a week inexchange for all the benefits we can offer you in terms of training and experience.