*Due to our first justgiving page closing early (an unexpected time limit!) this is the second version of our page! Thank you so everyone who donated to our original page, we are delighted to have already raised £5,000.*

We are delighted to have recently received the news that we are a finalist for the Social Enterprise StartUp of the year category at the 2023 North East, Yorkshire & the Humber StartUp Awards. An honour to be amongst a number of other brilliant Startups across the UK!

Team ReconnectEd are running the Brighton Marathon & Brighton 10k in April! Alex and Georgia (Co-Founders of ReconnectEd), plus their wonderful friends Helen, Katie, Ellie, Tom and Rachael are taking on the Brighton Marathon & Brighton 10k to raise money for ReconnectEd's coaching programme. We are all new to marathons and would really appreciate any support and donations to get us through the wet and wintery training runs!

The Reconnect Education Project CIC ('ReconnectEd') is a new social enterprise set up to help young people at risk of exclusion to flourish in mainstream school.

It is widely recognised that the most vulnerable of young people are at an unfair disadvantage, and the pandemic has worsened their life chances. Indeed, young people excluded from school are the most vulnerable in society. Just 1 in 2 progress to sustained destinations at age 16; young people in gangs are six times more likely to have been excluded compared to other young people assessed by children’s services; and one in two adult prisoners have been excluded from school.

The estimated costs of exclusion are £370,000 per young person in lifetime education, benefits, healthcare and criminal justice costs. This amounts to £2.9 billion, on average, for every year’s cohort of permanently excluded pupils (approximately 8,000).

ReconnectEd provides an early intervention, trauma-informed coaching programme to address the root causes of exclusion. Our ReconnectEd coaches undergo an intensive trauma-informed training programme and are recruited from the local communities so that they have ‘lived experience’ of the issues facing the young people and can swiftly build trusted relationships with them. Indeed, our first ReconnectEd coach, who started in January, is an alum of Yewlands Academy, where the ReconnectEd programme is based.

Our coaching programme is based in an area of extreme need in North East Sheffield. Over a third of the pupils at the school are living in poverty and the surrounding neighbourhood ranks highly on the indices of multiple deprivation and lacks adequate social infrastructure. Sheffield has also been identified as one of 5 cold spots where children who have been permanently excluded are ‘consistently failing to access quality education’ and where they have ‘poor to zero chance of achieving any good educational outcomes.'

We have identified a lack of longer-term approaches to address the root causes of exclusion which would create lasting change. This is why our programme includes daily provision, as needed, for the young people, their families and schools. Each coach will have a maximum of 10 young people so they can provide high quality, intensive support. In our 3 year pilot we aim to support up to 100 young people, through 10 coaches, and a further 1000 peers, teachers and family members through the positive ripple effect of the programme i.e. Improved self-regulation, mental wellbeing and resilience in the young people will lead to improved relationships with family, peers and teachers and the space to allow all young people to learn due to minimised poor behaviour.

We need to raise £1,000,000 to fund our 3 year-pilot. Brigantia Learning Trust, which is employing the ReconnectEd coaches, has pledged £250,000 towards the costs of up to 10 ReconnectEd coaches. The programme costs are approximately £4,000 per child for 6 months' intensive daily support to them, their families and the schools in year 1. If we reach our target, we will cover a third of our project costs for the year.

You can read more about ReconnectEd here: www.reconnecteducation.co.uk

Thank you so very much for your wonderful support!