Serious Fun on Saturdays
A benchmark for excellence in independent-state sector partnerships
Working with SHINE, some of the UK’s top independent schools open their doors to lend disadvantaged local children their superb facilities for some serious, fun and structured educational support. This partnership approach benefits everybody involved, while the generosity of the host schools makes the programme incredibly cost-effective. But the biggest winners are the kids themselves, who get to use some amazing kit for exciting, practical learning that starts them thinking for themselves.
If you’d like to know more, Serious Fun on Saturday is featured in SHINE’s 2010 Supporters’ Magazine (pages 4-5). Download Now
How it works
Serious Fun on Saturdays is a programme hosted by independent schools for students from local state schools who are unlikely to be able to access additional educational support at home.
Primary and secondary students attend sessions that are designed to be serious - with a focus on learning - but also fun, taking place in a new and exciting environment and using creative and alternative teaching methods.
Critical to the success of Serious Fun on Saturdays is a focus on developing partnerships at every level:
- with schools: independent schools working with state schools
- with teachers: secondary and primary, state and independent teachers working together
- with children and young people: students from independent schools working with and mentoring students from local state schools
What it aims to do
Each student is given the opportunity to:
- make use of first-class premises, facilities and resources
- enrich and extend their learning
- meet and mix with students from other schools and of other ages
In this way the Serious Fun on Saturdays programme encourages high achievement and personal development and helps to equip students for transition from primary to secondary school and from secondary to further or higher education.
SHINE's support
SHINE made a grant to start the first Serious Fun on Saturdays programme at St Paul's and Latymer Upper Schools in 2003. Since then three-year grants have been approved for a further twelve schemes. SHINE is currently partnering with ten leading independent schools to provide Serious Fun on Saturdays programmes for around 400 students a year from over 80 state schools in London and Manchester.
SHINE works with each of the Serious Fun on Saturdays schemes to ensure they are monitored and evaluated effectively. This includes looking at national standardised predictions and test results (SATs, NFER maths and the Suffolk reading test), teacher assessments, work samples, student feedback, internal evaluations of teaching and learning and independent evaluations (e.g. by the Institute of Education). SHINE also requests that staff provide exemplar programme materials to aid other schools to start new programmes.
"This project, with support from SHINE, is almost the pinnacle of ambition in relation to the much used term 'inclusion', as it brings together able young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and their more privileged peers in the independent sector, to mutual benefit... it is very exciting indeed!"
Director of Education, Hammersmith and Fulham
Quotes
"This project, with support from SHINE, is almost the pinnacle of ambition in relation to the much used term 'inclusion', as it brings together able young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and their more privileged peers in the independent sector, to mutual benefit... it is very exciting indeed!"
Director of Education, Hammersmith and Fulham