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LeedsGATE

About the project:

Working with the Gypsy and Traveller Community to enhance learning.

The Educational Engagement team at the University of Leeds is currently supporting a ‘Homework Club’ for young people from the Gypsy and Traveller community, most of whom are no longer accessing full-time education. LeedsGATE, a community group set up in 2003 to improve quality of life for Gypsy and Traveller people, enlisted our support with the project by providing engaging activities that promote university education in STEM topics.

Angela Allen, Community Tutor at the centre in Cross Green said;

The Homework Club at LeedsGATE was set up to give educational support to Gypsy/Traveller young people. We give support in STEM topics as well as English and maths Functional Skills. One of our objectives is to encourage our young people to go into further and higher education and to open new career opportunities for them. The University of Leeds has helped us to do this by inviting our young people to the campus and putting on interactive engineering activities. They were shown around the campus and asked questions on what it would be like to be a student there. Students from the University also came out to our centre to do engineering and team building tasks with our young people at the homework club. By our continued interaction with the University, our young people will be able to see that other doors are open to them and may be inspired to go into further and higher education in the future.

Referring to the project Steve Gleadall, Educational Engagement Manager said;

Students from Gypsy and Traveller communities are significantly under-represented in Further and Higher Education in the UK. We are delighted to be working with LeedsGATE, a very well-respected organisation locally and nationally, to start to address some of the educational inequalities these young people and their communities face. Whilst this is a small scale project at present we hope to learn from it and, through ongoing collaboration with LeedsGATE, continue to develop our work with Gypsy and Traveller students in the future.

Further information:

Find out more about LeedsGATE at, www.leedsgate.co.uk