The Leadership Consortium
The leadership consortium is where Team Affinity breaks new ground by researching and piloting cutting edge practice, that enriches the lives of our young people, leading to better equality of opportunity.
The Good Things Foundation
The Good Things Foundation makes up part of The Leadership Consortium. They work to close the digital divide in communities across the UK. They have developed a comprehensive service for digitally excluded people which any local organisation in the UK can use to Fix the Digital Divide in their communities.
A lack of digital skills and access can have a huge negative impact on a person’s life, leading to poorer health outcomes and a lower life expectancy, increased loneliness and social isolation, less access to jobs and education. "
Research
Read the research paper by Dr Becky Parry on data poverty in relation to care experienced young people.
Podcast
Listen to our podcast on Data Poverty with guests involved in bridging the gap in access to digital opportunity, for care experienced young people.
The Good Things Foundation
Visit the Good Things Foundation website to learn more about the work they do.
The Paul Hamlyn Foundation
The Paul Hamlyn Foundation is one of the largest independent funding bodies in the UK. They support social change, especially for young people.
Affinity 2020 CIC’s research programme is funding by The Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Affinity 2020 CIC hopes to create adaptive tool kits, which can be shared with teachers nationally.
In developing the outline for the crucial research programme, we have consulted with experts, both within education and social care. We have dived deep into the Department of Educations outcome-based data for children who are care experienced, educational barriers and systemic content which restricts academic growth of our young people who are care experienced. We have designed 5 research based key experiences to see if we can together answer the question “why do young people who are care experienced struggle to infer and retrieve from complex texts?”
This research programme is unique within education, little is known about how the curriculum (complex texts) and trauma can become barriers for care experienced young people. The themes of the programme are based around teacher knowledge and the use of visual thinking to address time-based trauma and children’s ability to conquer complex texts.
“Non-Linear Time Sequences In passages written exclusively for students—or more specifically for student assessments— time tends to unfold with consistency. A story is narrated in a given style with a given cadence and that cadence endures and remains consistent, but in the best books, books where every aspect of the narration is nuanced to create an exact image, time moves in fits and start. It doubles back. The only way to master such books is to have read them time and again and to be carefully introduced to them by a thoughtful teacher or parent”.
We are thrilled to be running this research with teachers from across Wickersley Partnership Trust. We are really looking forward to your invaluable input throughout the research. Please do take the time to provide us with feedback so that we can ensure the research continues to meet the evolving needs of our children who are care experienced.
We look forward to working with you to build a network of exceptional practitioners who will transform pedagogy ensuring every care experienced child has access to complex text and can experience the joy of the texts.
It's About Time
It’s About Time is a Pilot Study of the Use of Visual Thinking Practice with Care Experienced Young people.
