Football Beyond Borders launch ‘Beyond Lockdown

Jasper Kain, Co-founder of Football Beyond Borders, speaks on the award-winning football charity’s major new, national campaign to highlight why children missing school is a critical issue for society.

In 2019, 830,000 days of school were missed due to children being excluded. In the last five years, there has been a 60 per cent increase in the number of pupils excluded from England’s schools. In many parts of the country, the system that should be supporting our school children is letting them down.

School exclusions are a matter of national interest. Every cohort of permanently excluded students will go on to cost the state an extra £2.1 billion in education, health, benefits, and criminal justice costs, yet more and more pupils are being excluded each year. Children with diagnosed mental health, those from poorer backgrounds and certain ethnic minority groups, and those who have been in care are disproportionately represented in the statistics.

School exclusions directly and negatively affect educational and life outcomes of pupils - only one per cent of excluded pupils get five good GCSEs they need to access the workforce.

That is why we set up Football Beyond Borders. Initially it was our response to the London riots of 2011 and our sense that young people did not have the opportunities or agency to shape their future in a positive manner. With football as our common love, we set out to see whether it could be an effective vehicle to tackle this.

By the start of 2020, we had been a charity for six years, delivering over 60 programmes each week in London and the North West of England, with partners such as Gillette and Nike and a whole host of professional footballers supporting our work.

The closing of schools in March brought an end to this six year, unblemished run. For the first time in our history we had to tell our young people that there wouldn’t be a session in that initial week of school closure.

Knowing how hard isolation would be for our young people, within three weeks, our team had shifted much of our work online - e-sports in the form of FIFA video games to replace our pitch sessions, Virtual Therapy to replace our Play-Based Football Therapy approach, and our social and emotional classroom sessions being delivered entirely virtually under the guise of Passion Projects.

This adaptability allowed us to keep regular contact, and to maintain those trusting, consistent relationships with 92 per cent of our young people through the period of school closure.

As well as this, we decided to travel the country, to meet young people outside their homes and take a photographic record of the impact the lack of school was having. The result is a stunning photography book which launched our “Beyond Lockdown” Campaign.

The images and quotes in the book demonstrate the incredible potential and positivity of young people; alongside their realisation of what school means to them - that school is not just about education and learning but, crucially, it is about socialising with friends and a sense of connection.

Featuring personal testimonies from pupils and families, along with powerful visual demonstrations of why it is so important that we use the experience of lockdown to do everything we can to minimise exclusions.

For the first time, every family experienced the challenge of children not being in school this year. So, now we all know what it means when our children lose their education. We believe this awareness is an opportunity for us to shine a light on the issue of school exclusions and ensure we give disadvantaged young people the support they need.

We know from our work over the last six years that if a supportive web of relationships can be present in every child’s life, we can prevent the most vulnerable children from being unnecessarily excluded and enhance the educational experience of all children.

It is not down to schools alone to solve fundamental societal issues. As the RSA Report, ‘Pinball Kids - preventing school exclusions’ published in March pointed out, per pupil funding has fallen in real terms by 8 percent in the past 10 years. This has only become more acute in the past six months. We have seen where children’s vulnerability means their school has to take additional measures to keep them safe: doing home visits and upskilling staff in trauma-informed practice. These young people need our political focus to mitigate the growing impact of the trauma gap in our economy and society.

The second stage of the campaign “No More Empty Chairs” will be a powerful visual demonstration of why it is so important that we use the experience of lockdown to do everything we can to minimise exclusions.

The ‘Beyond Lockdown’ campaign now moves on to its second stage of the campaign - “No More Empty Chairs” - starting after half-term in November with the release of a dedicated film as well as first hand testimonies from pupils, parents and headteachers. It outlines the impact of school exclusions and calls on the government to issue schools with a new Vulnerability Premium fund to help keep the most vulnerable in mainstream school.

For now, children are back in school and, for the most part, we see the spring back in their step. But we know that thousands of children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, will face exclusion through the academic year.

The “Beyond Lockdown” photography book is available to buy from Football Beyond Borders website: www. footballbeyondborders.org

As part of the book launch, for every copy of the book purchase, Football Beyond Borders will gift a copy to a secondary school. U