Youth Worker

Who we are

The problem - On average, 160 young people are excluded from school each week. Once excluded, prospects for these young people are bleak, with only 4% achieving good GCSE grades, and 67% entering sustained education, employment or training compared to 96% of their non-excluded peers. This can be a pipeline to prison, with concerning statistics showing 63% of prisoners having been excluded from school.

Our mission - To ensure that young people who have been excluded from school are not excluded from society.

Who we serve - We support the hardest to reach young people in the most disadvantaged communities, each of whom are most at risk of experiencing school exclusion or are at risk of being excluded. Young people who are eligible for free school meals are 4x more likely to get excluded, along with black Caribbean boys. Young people with special educational needs are also six times as likely to be excluded as their peers.

Our work - We work in a number of different settings both during term time and after school. Our coaches lead small groups of 8-10 young people, using sport as a hook and mentorship as an anchor to develop their soft skills, as well as improve their physical & mental wellbeing. This, coupled with exposure to the work place through Career Taster Days, raises their aspirations and puts young people in a better position to enter sustained education, employment or training (EET) when they leave school.

Role Overview

Salary – £23,500 to £25,000 (pro rata if part time)

Workplace – Various, daily travel to our delivery sites with some home working

Hours – Up to full time 37.5 hours (we are open to requests for part time and full time working)

Start – August

We are looking for people to join our team across England and Wales in Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Cardiff, Luton, Milton Keynes, London.

We are recruiting Youth Workers across our delivery locations in England and Wales to join our squad in August for the new academic year. This is a frontline role where you will spend the majority of your time working with young people, building relationships with them and delivering our full programme of activities which includes rugby based activity sessions, employability workshops, career taster days and more.

You will be working with some of the hardest to reach young people who are most at risk of exclusion, in small groups of 8-10. We use rugby as a hook and mentorship as an anchor, using our four cornerstones (developing life skills, raising aspirations, improving physical wellbeing, focus on mental wellbeing) to develop young people throughout their time with us. We enable young people to be in a better position to enter sustained education, employment or training (EET) when they leave school. 

The delivery team always work in pairs, running our interventions across a variety of settings (including mainstream schools, Pupil Referral Units, Alternative Provisions, SEN schools, Youth Offenders Institutes, community centres and rugby clubs) working in the school timetable and between 3-7pm. While delivering our interventions is a big part of the job, you will also be responsible for supporting the team to ensure the successful collection of data, managing school relationships and delivering on partnership projects.

You do not need to be a rugby fanatic for this role, but you do need to be passionate about social mobility of the excluded. We are looking for someone with a youth work, teaching, mentoring or sports coaching background to help strengthen our team as we work towards our forward strategy. 

We are also adversiting for a Lead Youth Worker, Lead Coach and Delivery Lead. See our website for all job vacancies.