Featuring: Football Beyond Borders

Article
By Ollie Nicholas
15/08/19

Subtitle

Closing the education attainment gap and creating opportunity.

Contents

1. Football Beyond Borders

2. Creating Opportunity

3. The Women Who Changed The Game

The Women Who Changed The Game by Football Beyond Borders

Football Beyond Borders works with over 700 young people across the UK every week using their passion for football to transform their attitude to education, with the aim of creating a more equal and inclusive society. Recently their campaign; “The Women Who Changed The Game” has been a focus for promoting the empowerment of young girls and a legacy of women playing football beyond the Women’s World Cup.

Subtitle

Closing the education attainment gap and creating opportunity.

Contents

1. Football Beyond Borders

2. Creating Opportunity

3. The Women Who Changed The Game

Football Beyond Borders works with over 700 young people across the UK every week using their passion for football to transform their attitude to education, with the aim of creating a more equal and inclusive society. Recently their campaign; “The Women Who Changed The Game” has been a focus for promoting the empowerment of young girls and a legacy of women playing football beyond the Women’s World Cup.
1. Football Beyond Borders

On DROPOUT we have spoken about a few projects that have been related to football, and whilst this is partly influenced by a personal love of the game, we cannot underestimate the potential of the sport to be a positive and impactful influence in people's lives. Football Beyond Borders (FBB) is a phenomenal organisation that uses football to support the education and empowerment of young people, so that they may reach their full potential and make their voice heard.

Football has the power to create an environment that promotes inclusivity, where young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, have the opportunity to develop their skills, attitude, and character to be successful within education, work, and public life. Ultimately, FBB acts as an education charity that utilises the values of the beautiful game as a means of engagement to help young people focus on education and their future. FBB achieves this through a football-themed curriculum which puts a young person’s passions at the heart of their learning as well as developing their social and emotional skills and increasing aspiration through transformational experiences. 

This curriculum is implemented at schools and youth centres across the UK, aiming to tackle the root causes of low educational attainment, poor school attendance and challenging behaviour. The programme combines classroom based learning with character focused football sessions. So, for example, students will learn to use a range of adjectives and adapt their language to different contexts and tones through creating football commentary. Education should not exist with the ‘one size fits all’ mentality, because our culture is made up of people with vastly different backgrounds. Alternative means of learning should certainly be utilised to suit circumstance.

Within our society we have an educational attainment gap that needs to be closed. Football has a proven role to play in supporting young people (predominately boys) from low income back-grounds to engage with learning, boosting their attendance and reducing the likelihood of school exclusion. For too many kids, disengagement and particularly exclusion can contribute towards poor literacy and numeracy, unemployment and frequent engagement with the criminal justice system. Just 1% of students who are excluded from school attain 5 Good GCSEs, and more than half of young offenders have been excluded from school. More worryingly, levels of exclusion are rising sharply with a 40% increase in fixed and permanent exclusions from school over the past 3 years.

The FBB model exists to create transferable skills which participants can use in their wider life. It uses football to develop the soft skills of resilience, team work, focus and taking action. The aim is to create a team that has pride in themselves, so that young people can become leaders in their school and the wider community.

The Women Who Changed The Game by Football Beyond Borders

The Women Who Changed The Game by Football Beyond Borders

2. Creating Opportunity

Aside from their school programme, FBB like to engage young people in opportunities outside school so they may gain experiences to help them within the workplace and within society as a whole. As grownups, we all experienced that transition away from education into the ‘real world’ as many call it. This can be something that is daunting, so it’s important that young people feel prepared to take the next steps in their life after they finish education. This transition is even more important for children that come for disadvantaged backgrounds, who aren’t often exposed to professional environments and opportunities.

To provide their participants with real life opportunities, FBB have established their very own football media platform called ‘FBB TV’ which provides young people with the training and opportunity to produce their own media. FBB TV presenters have some impressive interviews under their belts, working with professional footballer such as Chris Smalling, Raheem Sterling, Cyrus Christie, and Ryan Bertrand, as well as Sky Sport’s pundits Guillem Balague and Kate Abdo. It’s amazing that the students get to interact with some footballing icons as well as other people that can help to highlight possible careers paths and opportunities for young people.

FBBTV has also developed its ‘Youth Voices’ programme which aims to provide further opportunities for young people within digital media, film making and public speaking skills. Youth Voices puts FBB participants at the forefront of all of the charity’s communications and social action work. Everyone at FBB holds this project in very high regard, as it embraces youth culture into their digital media channels, and gives the organisation and FBB participants an opportunity to tell their story. The ambition that exists at FBB to always go further in creating opportunities and allowing young people to express themselves is what makes them such a special organisation. FBBTV was an essential first step in creating digital media content that was fronted, produced, and edited by FBB participants. Now the organisation is keen to go further by giving their young people opportunities to explore career opportunities within the creative industries.

As part of the Youth Voices initiative, a number of participants have gone on to produce shows at the COPA90 studios, as well as producing all the digital and social media content and marketing to support the shows. Having that real industry experience cannot be underestimated, because you can actually see what is possible and that these types of careers are attainable. Football is much more than just what takes place on the pitch and it is important that FBB participants can see real opportunities within all types of employment. FBB TV is great way of retaining the engagement of participants beyond the classroom.

The Women Who Changed The Game by Football Beyond Borders

The Women Who Changed The Game by Football Beyond Borders

3. The Women Who Changed The Game

For the past month, we’ve been lucky enough to have another World Cup taking place. Everyone knows that a World Cup means that there’s tonnes of football to watch on TV everyday for the best part of a month - what could be better? This year, men’s football took a back seat, with the women’s game taking centre stage on our televisions. In the UK we saw record numbers of people tuning in to watch women’s football matches, which was really great to see. It was a pleasant surprise hearing so many people requesting for the Women’s World Cup to be put on in the pub and it was great to see England’s quarter-final on the big screens at Glastonbury.

But what now? Sure, women’s football was given a month in the spotlight, but what will be the legacy of the Women’s World Cup? It’s clear that massive strides have been made in boosting the popularity of the sport amongst girls across the world. This is something that needs to be harnessed, because football can be an amazing exponent of self-expression, happiness and opportunity for people from all walks of life. We are now presented with an opportunity to extend these ideals to more people than ever before, and it would be a great shame to not capitalise on this moment.

Throughout this article, we’ve spoken about the amazing work that is carried out by FBB to provide opportunity inside and outside school for young people by using football. In anticipation of the Women’s World Cup, FBB’s mission to use football to boost opportunities for girls became a priority, and at the end of May, FBB launched their “The Women Who Changed The Game” campaign to celebrate women within football and the community. On the 5th June, FBB and NIKE held a special youth-led evening featuring photography, art, film and entertainment as they paid homage to The Women Who Changed The Game. The event saw a group of inspirational young women from Archbishop Lanfranc, Elm Green and Harris Peckham schools come together to host a very special event celebrating the Women Who Changed the Game.

The Women Who Changed The Game by Football Beyond Borders

The Women Who Changed The Game by Football Beyond Borders

These young women put together an event that highlighted the amazing achievements of women throughout history. For the event, female students researched and explored inspirational women from around the world and worked with renowned filmmakers, artists and influencers to create their very own zine and a range of other multimedia content. It was the culmination of a six-week project that had seen the girls work closely together, developing strong bonds and showing fantastic teamwork to achieve their goal of writing women into history

FBB’s Head of Female Participation Ceylon Hickman has spoken passionately about the event: “This event is more than an exhibition. It’s more than a celebration of women’s football in anticipation of the biggest world cup in history. It’s a movement started by girls in London who are fed up with being left out of the history books. They’ve taken it upon themselves to change that by uncovering the stories of women from around the world who have created change in their communities, and shone a light on women in London who are making moves in their fields. They’ve created a zine that etches these women, and themselves as authors of this work, into history. A zine that will live beyond the World Cup.”

When speaking to Ceylon about this, it excites me that the word ‘legacy’ keeps coming up. This is exactly the way this should be. Recently there has been amazing news that, from September, FBB will be trebling the number of girls provisions in schools. FBB wanted to cement the legacy of the World Cup by ensuring that inclusion is more than a buzzword. The programmes will work to raise the aspirations of young women through building trustworthy relationships with relatable role models, providing girls with a safe space to explore and develop new skills. Therapeutic support that increases confidence and self-esteem will enable the girls to develop strong connections with their peers, all framed around a common love for football. This is just the beginning of a very important period for girls within football and beyond, firmly etching their legacy within the history books where they had so often been overlooked.

We are currently in the early stages of working together with FBB to produce content that can help support girls in further exploring the issues and ideas that have been raised during The Women Who Changed The Game campaign. We are honoured to be involved and we are excited to share more about this with everyone in the coming months.

  • Featuring: Football Beyond Borders

Bibliography

Football Beyond Borders (footballbeyondborders.org)
The Women Who Changed The Game (footballbeyondborders.org)

Social

Football Beyond Borders Twitter (@FBeyondBorders)
Football Beyond Borders Instagram (@footballbeyondborders)
Ceylon Andi Hickman (@ceylonandi)
Kelvyn Quagraine (@kelvynQuagraine)

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