Your Life Your Turn

On the 23 July 2020 Birmingham Children’s Trust held an online Webinar for young people, aged 15+, in Birmingham. The webinar was hosted by Evolve Social Impact, in partnership with Birmingham Children`s Trust, and as part of this event  Birmingham Children’s Trust had five of its partners in the city speak directly to young people: Shoosmiths, Engie, Barclays, Birmingham Careers Service and Sport 4 Life UK.

All the organisations held workshops and talks on the day to support young people. Workshops were held on Zoom, and each lasted 30 minutes. 

Birmingham Children’s Trust explained:

About Birmingham Children’s Trust and Corporate Parenting

Birmingham Children`s Trust began life in April 2018. The Trust is responsible for delivering children’s social care services in Birmingham, as well as providing an Adoption and Fostering service. Our mission is clear: to improve the quality of life for children and families across Birmingham today, tomorrow and always. We believe Birmingham is the place to do social work. 

Corporate Parenting

When a child goes into care in Birmingham the Trust becomes their corporate parent. That means that we’re responsible for making sure they have the best possible care and that they’re safe, in the same way that a good parent would. In the Trust the corporate parenting team work to ensure children and young people receive the best possible care.

Shoosmiths

Nicola Ellen (Shoosmiths) one of our partners did a talk to young people before workshops took place on personal working experiences and her career journey and shared the work of Shoosmiths with young people. The element of having personal experience shared really helped young people relate to the idea of life-skills and how important individual life-skills are to each person, whether this is in their personal lives or in employment.

The webinar included four workshops on the day:

• Birmingham Career`s Service - Careers advice and guidance on school exams for Year 11 pupils.
• Sport 4 Life UK - Mentoring and healthy relationships and content on their courses, aimed at 12+.
• Barclays - Money management, budgeting advice and life-skills offer.
• Engie Workshop - Apprenticeships for care leavers and the service support to care leavers.

Key features of the workshops

• Helping young people to build life-skills and understand what life skills-are? (the skills we build through personal experiences).
• Helping young people prepare for adulthood and transition to independence.
• Supporting young people to know what local opportunities are available to them.

Staff feedback

Here are some quotes from staff; 

• “Thank you for supporting the Your Life Your Turn life-skills event last week as a workshop holder and delivering valuable information to young people. You did an amazing job and we were impressed by the content you included in each workshop.”
• “Great event and a good chance to share the skills we have to support young people building their own skill set.”
• “Very positive webinar and great to see we can hold events like this during lockdown to support young people.”

Young people feedback

Most importantly here are some quotes from the young people that attended:

• “I thought the webinars offered lots of information such as money management, I especially found the Barclays workshop useful for me.”
• “It was a great opportunity to attend and I learnt a lot from the workshops, I didn’t attend all of the workshops and would like to next time.”

The Webinar was a great success with 66% of young people saying they would attend again, and 34% of young people who said they would consider attending another one. From holding this webinar, we learnt that 80% of young people had not attended a life skills event before, and we are now looking forward to building more opportunities on the life-skills agenda in Birmingham.

We are hugely proud of the work of our partners in making the webinar possible and want to thank them for all the hard work and giving young people access to opportunities building their life skills in Birmingham.

For more Information about Birmingham Children’s Trust visit our website, Search ‘Corporate Parenting’ to get in touch with us, or follow us on Twitter @bhamchildtrust