Hansard

Thank you for inviting me along this morning. I have worked at the Spartans Community Foundation since 2009. We opened our doors in north Edinburgh in December 2008.The foundation is the heart of the football club. Operating as a social enterprise, we run the facility that the football club hires. We reinvest our profits back into our social impact programmes, specifically targeting the community of north Edinburgh. We deliver on four key thematic areas across those programmes—youth work, education, physical health and wellbeing, and community engagement—and we deliver about 35 or 36 programmes per week across the community, either on site or in local schools.10:15I am speaking about young people because, when we first opened our doors, we very much focused on the young people of north Edinburgh. That reach has expanded dramatically since Covid: until recently, our youngest participant was three years old and our oldest participant was 103. Our programmes have expanded because the need has got greater: we are working in an area where we know that 30 per cent of children are living in relative poverty. Deprivation is a real issue in north Edinburgh and we are there to ask one simple question, which is “How can we help?” How can we use the power of sport, football and people to build relationships and trust with individuals in the community and to help them to go from having a survival attitude into a thriving environment?Regarding our education programmes, we run two alternative schools on site. We have a senior alternative school for 24 pupils who come from schools across Edinburgh, making it the only programme that we deliver that is actually city-wide. That is not like a mainstream school: it is there to complement mainstream but is a very different model; we take young people out of traditional mainstream education and give them a different environment where they can try to learn and thrive. Our junior alternative school is for 12 pupils across three local primary schools in north Edinburgh. They come to us for one day a week and that takes them out of the classroom and into an environment where learning can be led by the young person and is not forced on them. We do simple things like having therapy dogs, because young people want to read to those dogs. That school is a learning opportunity in a different environment that will engage them in a manner that is different to mainstream education.The need grows ever greater. I can tell you that we had about eight places for our senior alternative school last year and got 17 referrals from across the city. The need is greater than the demand and we are trying to do more, but we have a maximum capacity.Last year, we opened a new £1.4 million education and youth work space on site, in the corner of the stadium pitch. It was designed by young people who come to our junior and senior alternative schools and includes a large youth work space. It has a large kitchen because we know that food poverty a real issue, so all our youth work programmes provide hot food and also because we know that real relationships can develop in the kitchen. We also have two sensory rooms, one that is a calming, de-escalation room and another with a more educational element. That new space has been a game changer for us and our youth work attendance has increased by 25 per cent in the past year. It has given the young people their own space and their own home, which is really important in ensuring that communities actually feel part of something and have somewhere to go to get help.As you are aware, our extra time programme has been funded by the Scottish Government for the past three years and will go into a fourth phase. We have worked with more than 300 families in the past three years and the biggest game changer is that that programme has allowed us to focus on a whole-family approach. We recognised that when wee Mark was coming to our Footea club on a Friday night or our science, engineering, technology and mathematics club on a Monday, we were only skimming the surface of the problem and were not actually getting to the root cause. That root cause was at home, and could be poor housing, unemployment or addiction, so we need to look at how we can help mum and dad, gran and grandpa, aunt and uncle. That programme has allowed us to provide a holistic approach and get around families to give them a better chance and better opportunities in life.We are about to launch a new three-year strategy that has been based on extensive external consultation with the community. We are not here to drive that—the community is. Where can we best use our people and skills to make sure that people have better lives? As part of that, we have also done an internal consultation with our own staff.Our focus for the future will be on the transition between primary school and secondary school, as we know that that is a huge issue in our community. There are children who are not going to primary school so how will they go to secondary school and how can we support them better with that transition by having a Spartans hub based in the local high school that can give them alternative ways of learning and build relationships that make them feel comfortable at a fairly daunting stage in their lives?We will also do more on mental health and increase our support for science, technology, engineering and maths because we see that as a good way of engaging with primary school pupils and helping them to enjoy learning because it is interactive and fun.That is me; I am sorry if I went on too long.