The value of volunteering

20 Feb 2012

With Student Volunteering Week being celebrated this week, we look back at an Ofsted survey which found that well-structured volunteering opportunities contribute positively to young people’s personal development and social engagement.

Our report Choosing to Volunteer, published in December 2011, surveyed the experience of young people involved in volunteering. Inspectors collected first-hand evidence through visits to six secondary schools, seven colleges and six youth and community organisations. They also gathered online evidence about the experiences and views of volunteering from around 328 young people. In addition, Ofsted conducted three focus groups with young people.

Key findings

All the schools and colleges visited for the survey worked with national charities and agencies to extend the range of volunteering opportunities on offer or to target specific groups of young people. In the targeted provision visited, organisations and practitioners built strong and trusting relationships with vulnerable or disadvantaged young people. They worked to identify their support needs and remove any barriers to the young people participating in volunteering to help them develop social skills. However, the survey found that many of these charities and external agencies were facing very challenging futures due to reductions in grants and other sources of funding.

The most successful schools, colleges, and youth and community settings found creative ways of integrating volunteering within the curriculum and through ‘in-house’ projects, enabling young people to take on greater levels of responsibility. They did not consider it as an ‘add on’ to mainstream learning. Senior leaders interviewed in the schools and colleges visited asserted that dedicating curriculum time to volunteering helped raise academic standards and improved retention and attendance rates.

Although linking volunteering with accreditation motivated some young people, many students spoke about the basic value of volunteering and how it had nothing to do with gaining a qualification. The more successful volunteering programmes were, at least in part, shaped by individual young people and involved a level of risk and challenge. Two Year 10 students at Feversham College in Bradford learnt much about homelessness as part of a citizenship class. They decided that the problem, particularly in winter, was such that they wanted to help further. As well as undertaking research and writing to their MP to highlight the problem locally, they visited a homeless drop-in centre and talked to workers and homeless people. They worked beyond what was required for their studies to produce a video which is played on the school plasma screen and which has been used by teachers in tutor time. They have encouraged students to donate cans of food to be distributed to the homeless by the Salvation Army and a local church. The pair are currently building up a membership on their website and plan to set up their own charity when they leave school.

Recommendations

Tony Gallagher, Ofsted’s National Advisor for Youth Support, recently met with Cabinet Office, Department for Education officials and Paul Oginsky, the Government Adviser for the National Citizen Service (NCS) to discuss the findings of the report.

The report recommends that schools, colleges and youth services review their curriculum and use active and constructive links with community groups, businesses and sports groups to enhance young people’s learning through volunteering. They should ensure key staff are skilled and knowledgeable about volunteering, through workforce development opportunities and networking. Most providers also need to develop more effective ways of evaluating and articulating the learning outcomes that young people gain from volunteering. Some young people have noted that volunteering needs to be packaged in an attractive and appealing way to encourage more young people to get involved.

Tony says, ‘The two most common reasons given by those who did not volunteer were: being too busy and not having the right contacts. Some students did not know how to get involved or said there was a lack of interest from parents. However, the great majority of young people that we spoke to thought that volunteering had helped them to develop important skills and attributes such as advocacy, team working, motivation and resilience. Many also reported that it had helped to improve their employment prospects and develop their political awareness.

‘Volunteering not only enriches participants, community groups and civil society more widely but can provide alternative opportunities for young people to achieve their goals.’

Good practice

Examples of good practice which emerged from the survey included a long-standing Peer Mentoring Scheme at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College which benefited students that volunteered. They were trained in problem solving, coaching techniques and time management skills and reported increased levels of self-confidence and gaining improved assignment grades. Over a period of three years, the college documented mentee and mentor evaluations and acted on learner feedback to refine the process.

A main challenge the college had to tackle was how to engage mentees without them feeling singled out for support and how to keep mentors motivated. Staff introduced clear timescales for completing the mentoring process and allowed learners to record the accrued hours towards gaining enrichment certificates. Involving mentees in initial training helped to strengthen procedures. One of the lessons learnt was that mentoring was most successful when viewed as an equal relationship with equal responsibilities where both parties could develop trust and insight. One mentee commented, ‘Being a mentee has made me want to become a mentor because I now know what the mentee expects.’

The report, Choosing to Volunteer, is available on the Ofsted website and listed below under Resources with two examples of good practice. For more good practice case studies from across the country, visit: www.goodpractice.ofsted.gov.uk.

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