We have long-standing relationships with 70% of the primary schools in Southport, Formby and the surrounding areas (although we’d love to increase this number!)

We will regularly visit many of these schools to lead assemblies or ‘collective worship’ covering a huge variety of topics such as Bullying, Getting on and falling out, Achieving Goals, and a range of Christian Values. We always have fun – using drama, music, games, and video technology – to get the message across in an engaging, interactive and memorable way. (Valued at £50-£100 per booking, depending on scale.)

We have several series of RE and PSCHE lessons that we lead throughout the year, including ‘You, Me & RSE’ (Relationshps & Sex Education), CAP Money Skills, Walk Through The Bible, active RE lessons, and much more. (Valued at £40-£80 per lesson, depending on scale.)

We are often asked to take themes from our assemblies or lessons to expand into day-long workshops where the whole school take it in turns to learn creatively, practically, actively, and kinaesthetically. These can vary from PE based activities, craft, or a day of Prayer Spaces. (Valued at £500 per day.)

Our ‘Good Show’ primary school project calls on a large group of volunteers and offers 3 presentations to the schools each year, one each term:

• A pantomime style dramatic presentation looking at the real meaning of Christmas (Valued at £300 per school.)
• A large-scale Easter presentation in the style of Mission Impossible, for which SASWTrust is renowned for. (Valued at £500 per school).
• A presentation called Moving On for year 6s moving into high school. (Valued at £50 per school).

We run a several different series of primary after school clubs:

• Awesome Club where we teach ‘awesome skills’ based on the fruits of the Spirit found in Galations 5:22. (Valued at £750 per term.)
• Guardians of Ancora Club where we explore stories from the New Testament using a tablet based platform game from Scripture Union. (Valued at £750 per term.)
• Sweaty Church, which is a continuous worshipping community of children (and often their parents) centered about sport, team games, sung worship, Bible discussion and group prayer. (Valued at £1,400 per term.)

In the past we tried to do this by facilitating classic “Christian Union” style lunchtime clubs. However, over the years we have learnt the importance of serving the 95+% of young people with no church connection, which means instead of expecting a small handful of young people to come to find us tucked away in a classroom, we set ourselves up to go to where they are, both in physicality and holistically.

Our lunchtime ‘Safe Spaces’ do exactly that, as we pop-up our gazebo setup out on the school yard, most lunchtimes speaking to over 100 students in each school who come to check in with us weekly. As Christian workers and volunteers, we aim to create a safe space for those students to explore the big issues of life and faith. We provide an opportunity for them to rate their mental health and wellbeing with our traffic light system (data which the school leadership then use to shape their pastoral care), to explore the roots of how they are feeling, and explore positive practices. We find as we embark on this journey with so many young people across our five main secondary schools, it has become a great platform for building trusted relationships, where deeper issues of life and faith are regularly discussed very naturally.

We value a lunchtime Safe Space at £100 per day (including staff hours), but again seek to offer this as a free resource to schools.

We are occasionally asked to lead assemblies in high schools for various year groups on topics such as self-worth, peer-pressure, anti-bullying and so on. We often expand these topics into workshops, ran either by ourselves, or bought-in national Christian projects – energetic bands from The Message Trust, for example. We have also made guest appearances in RE lessons and PSCHE lessons.

Our charity staff have worked with numerous volunteers, apprentices from the Pais Movement, and local church youth workers in order to best serve the local secondary schools’ needs, working with them to boost their statuary provision of spritiual, moral, social and cultural education.

Our work in schools extends into the rest of the community through our network of churches and youth work throughout the area. We are keen to enable, equip and mobilise the local Church more in this way, in order to best continue the journey with local young people we discover to be keen to explore, respond and grow in the Christian faith.