SFCA Trusted Partners and Suppliers

Teens for Tomorrow works in association with Meningitis NOW is a signposting organisation to ensure young people know the facts around meningitis and septicaemia.

Teenagers and young adults are the second most at-risk group vulnerable to meningitis and septicaemia. After the tragic loss of two students at St Brendan's Sixth Form College, their family, friends, and peers started the Teens for Tomorrow campaign to encourage everyone to #Knowthesigns and #Getthevaccine to secure the futures of young people.

Visit the Teens for Tomorrow website to find out more and get involved.

As part of its strategy to support colleges in developing opportunities for young people to engage in social action, SFCA made a pledge to the #iwill campaign: http://www.iwill.org.uk/pledge/sixth-form-colleges-association/.

SFCA has pledged as follows:

• Through our communication channels, we will encourage SFCA members to support the #iwill campaign, where appropriate.
• We will use our profile where appropriate to ensure Government meets its commitment to social action and to the #iwill campaign.
• We will search out where good practice regarding youth social action is happening, and seek to champion and encourage it to the wider sector.
• We will work with our membership to research the benefits of youth social action where there is good 

#iwill is a UK-wide campaign that aims to make social action part of life for as many 10 to 20 year-olds as possible by the year 2020. Through collaboration and partnership it is spreading the word about the benefits of youth social action, working to embed it in the journey of young people and create fresh opportunities for participation. The campaign is being coordinated by the charity Step Up To Serve, governed by an independent board and has cross-party support.

In 2012, the Prime Minister asked Dame Julia Cleverdon and Amanda Jordan OBE to review how to increase the quality and quantity of youth social action. After a wide-ranging consultation their report highlighted the barriers to youth social action and produced a set of recommendations.

Barriers included a shortage of activities in education from 10 upwards; confusion in the education and business sectors about the kind of initiatives they could support; failure to promote and inspire young people to take part; and an absence of a coherent vision to promote a culture of youth social action.

The recommendations were to create an easy to navigate “service journey” for young people; scale up programmes to fill gaps in provision; embed social action in young people’s educational experience (school, further and higher education); develop a culture of promoting and celebrating youth social action comparable to effective programmes run in other countries around the world.

The review, concluded that an initiative uniting organisations and the public should be set up to increase opportunities for young people. This initiative should be time limited, add to existing activity, and be a research and advocacy body, not one running programmes itself. This initiative is the #will campaign that is being coordinated by the charity Step Up To Serve.

Find out more at www.iwill.org.uk and on Twitter @iwill_campaign

National Numeracy is an independent charity established in 2012 to help raise low levels of numeracy among both adults and children and to promote the importance of everyday maths skills. We aim to challenge negative attitudes, influence public policy and offer practical ways of helping adults and children improve their numeracy - in the community, the workplace and formal education

National Numeracy are working towards thier aims in three main ways:

1. Raising awareness about poor numeracy levels which exist in the UK, how numeracy differs from mathematics, and the promoting the recognition that everyone can improve through campaigns such as National Numeracy Day. 

2. Improving numeracy. We’ve helped over 130,000 so far people to check whether they have the ‘Essentials of Numeracy’, and are helping them to achieve them if they don’t.

3. Improving communication of numbers and data by helping organisations to use a ‘Plain Numbers’ approach, so that anyone can understand their information regardless of their numeracy level.

1 in every 2 working-age adults in the UK struggles with using numbers. Many of us are just getting by when we could be getting ahead: earning more, saving more and doing the things we love better. Just by getting a bit of help with our numbers. That’s what National Numeracy Day 2018 is all about.

Recognising the important part numbers play in everyday life and helping people sharpen their skills and build their confidence so they can use numbers to help them save money, progress at work – or just manage everyday situations more easily. Being better with numbers isn’t a special talent, it’s something we can all learn. We’re all numbers people. Find out how you can make numbers work for you and check your skills now at www.nnchallenge.org.uk Too many people accept their current abilities, not realising that they can change. But everyone can improve and get the Essentials of Numeracy – the skills needed to use numbers and data at home and at work. Anyone can check if they have the Essentials of Numeracy using the free online assessment tool, the National Numeracy Challenge www.nnchallenge.org.uk It also directs people to a range of resources to help them improve.

Anyone can take the Challenge at any time. Three quarters of people who have assessed their skills, used some learning resources and then reassessed, have improved. If you achieve a score of 80 then you have the Essentials of Numeracy and can claim a digital badge and certificate. National Numeracy Day is run by the UK charity National Numeracy. 

Find out more at www.numeracyday.com and on Twitter @Nat_Numeracy 

Voting is a basic right in a democracy.

Participation in free elections is a fundamental human right (protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UK’s Human Rights Act). The reasons for excluding people from the vote therefore have to be fair and balanced. As many 16 and 17-year-olds are contributing to the taxation system, the principle stands that they should be entitled to vote as a fundamental right.

The current system is “taxation without representation”.

16 and 17-year-olds hold many responsibilities in our society, and extending the franchise would engage them in the political affairs, current events, and the democratic processes that impact their lives. Fair.Vote (Votes at 16) would encourage young people to understand the society they live in, influence key decisions that affect them, and ensure youth issues are represented.

We believe it is impossible to justify the automatic and blanket exclusion of 16 and 17-year-olds from the right to vote because, at 16, the law allows a person to:

1. Pay income tax and National Insurance

2. Become a director of a company

3. Get married or enter a civil relationship

4. Give full consent to medical treatment

5. Obtain tax credits and welfare benefits in their own right

6. Consent to sexual relationships

7. Leave home

8. Change their name by deed poll

9. Join the armed forces

10. Become a member of a trade union or a co-operative society

Young people need to be encouraged to take part in democracy, not locked out of it.

Having learnt the principles in compulsory citizenship education 16 and 17-year-olds are ready to participate in civic life, shown by the huge numbers of young people already active in local youth councils, youth parliament, or student unions. Fair.Vote (Votes at 16) would inspire more young people to play an active role in our society. 

Young people aren’t apathetic.

Apathy among young people has always been a myth and the recent election has shattered that illusion for good. Students are not apathetic: they care about rising debt, diminishing access to education, and inequality in our society that makes them the first generation in years to be statistically worse off than their parents. The result of the general election in 2017 showed that thousands of young people were willing to engage with politics, many for the very first time. There were, however, 1.5 million 16 and 17-year-olds who did not receive this opportunity.

Find out more at www.fair.vote and on Twitter @fairvote16  

Becoming a Social Mobility Pledge accredited employer demonstrates your commitment to accessing and progressing talent from all backgrounds, and highlights your work towards improving social mobility.

The aim of the Social Mobility Pledge is to encourage business to play their crucial role in boosting social mobility in the UK and highlight which businesses and employers are going the extra mile.

• Only 1 in 8 children from low-income backgrounds is likely to become a high-income earner as an adult

• 83%.Of young people in the North East think that work experience should be compulsory on their school/college curriculum

• Just five elite schools sent more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge universities than nearly 2,000 schools, which make up two thirds of the entire state secondary school sector.

Find out more at www.socialmobilitypledge.org and on Twitter @thesmpledge 

National Citizen Service (NCS) is more than just a youth programme — we are a family of hundreds of grassroots organisations, each with their own unique expertise and ability to inspire young people on their NCS journey. As such, NCS has a positive local impact in communities right across the country.

In addition to our delivery partners, we work collaboratively with many inspiring organisations who have a crucial role to play in delivering quality content for young people. 

Together, we’re committed to building a national institution, a rite of passage that can transform young lives and their communities - one NCS graduate at a time. 

Find out more at www.ncsyes.co.uk and on Twitter @NCS 

We are very pleased to be able to partner with think-cell, a powerful presentation and charting program that works via integration with Office apps on both PC and Mac. Using think-cell, you can create over 40 different types of chart, such as scatterplots, Gantt, and Mekko charts, within minutes. SFCA staff are able to use the program, which is used by the majority of top consulting firms, free of charge in order to easily and accurately visualise complex data on behalf of members in our research and policy work. If you are an SFCA member, we can provide you with your own free access to think-cell; email Noni, our research and policy manager, at noni.csogor@sixthformcolleges.org to learn more about this.