What’s Beyond Social Services?

Beyond Social Services is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to helping children and youths from less privileged backgrounds break away from the poverty cycle. The organisation provides guidance, care and resources that enable families and communities to keep their young people in school and out of trouble.

What’s Beyond’s LIFE Programme?

LIFE stands for Learning is Fun and Exciting. It's a community-based education programme that aims to help primary school children who are facing multiple challenges to experience learning in a fun and exciting way so that they are able to attain their age appropriate literacy and numeracy which will give them a fighting chance to further their education.

LIFE aims to help these children acquire the skills and behaviour that will help them integrate and learn in mainstream education settings.

LIFE Saturday Programme:

What’s Our Goal?

Our programme focuses on three Cs:

·        Communication

·        Collaboration

·        Confidence

We want to give the kids a leg up in school – understanding that many of them don’t have the resources to have tuition or go to enrichment classes.

While we’re not a tuition programme, we do aim to help the kids build as strong a foundation as we can – whether it’s understanding key concepts in Maths or having a strong foundation in English or speaking confidently and politely.

We work to get to know the kids well so that we help identify their strengths and build on them. For instance, a student might not have very strong reading skills, but have a wide general knowledge from finding out about things she’s interested in on You Tube. Here, we’d look to see how we can help her show the rest of us what she knows.

We understand that education and academics are not the same thing – and that being book smart isn’t the same as having the skills to grow.

We recognise there are many, many, ways to learn: from taking photographs around the neighbourhood, to taking apart diapers to learn about absorption.

Here, we want volunteers and kids learn about learning – and in the process they learn more about themselves, their strengths, and how they can make a positive impact on people and places around them.

In short, we find out what the kids are interested in and what they’re good at. 

We use that as a starting point to build fun, engaging, learning programmes to help them grow in confidence, help them communicate effectively and work and play collaboratively.

What Happens at the Whampoa Saturday LIFE Programme?

We work with the kids for two hours every Saturday.

·        Hour one is usually spent helping the kids with homework. In doing so, we also focus on helping them build a good foundation in English – because if the kids don’t understand English, they won’t be able to learn Maths or Science. Nor would they be able to communicate with people around them.

·        In the second hour, we give English, Maths, Science a fun twist. This could be via Maths games, Science experiments, or doing presentations, making art, playing charades, or coming up with a puppet show.

Who Comes up with the Curriculum?

Our volunteers come from a range of backgrounds – from tertiary students to executives in multinationals to full-time parents.

Volunteers leverage their own strengths and interests, research curricula and work on lesson plans for the class.

What’s in the Pipeline:

The Beyond team is working on laying out the specific objectives and processes for the programme moving forward. Eg.

• ·      recording student results quarterly after their exams to see if their results are improving.
• ·        building volunteer relationships with parents through meet ups three to four times a year.

o   Through these meet ups volunteers can get feedback from parents whether the child is benefiting and the parents can share feedback from the kid’s school teachers so that volunteers can understand each child’s strengths and weaknesses better and know how to direct the focus better.

o   Volunteers can also share what parents can work on at home with the child.

• ·        Deploying NIE trained teachers to help with lesson plans.

The LIFE programme's been evolving, but our goal stay the same. To give kids a leg up to succeed.