Light Up Learning

Organisation

Light Up Learning is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO) providing one-to-one mentoring for high school students in Edinburgh and the Lothians. The programme has been successfully operating in partnership with Lasswade High School since February 2015 and Castlebrae Community High School since August 2018. From November 2020, we have been partnering with Armadale Academy and Leith Academy, and most recently are working with Wester Hailes Education Centre. 

The programme aims to address issues of unequal access to education and disengagement in the classroom by creating low-stress, supportive, and playful learning environments for young people who have experienced disadvantage. We place each student in charge of their own learning and give them the resources, skills, and contacts they need to achieve their potential. 

Location

Most of the work for this role could be done remotely, with occasional visits to schools to speak with our staff, teachers and young people. We could also offer the option of face-to-face supervision meetings if this was preferred by the candidate.

Project

The internship would involve helping us gather the research we need to expand as a charity and offer support to more young people across Scotland who are at risk of disengaging from education.  As a small charity, we rely on providing strong evidence of the impact of our work in order to procure funding for our programme and to develop partnerships with new schools. The intern would assist us with both gathering evidence of the impact of our current work and exploring existing research on relevant aspects of our work which could strengthen our mentoring service and inform our future development as an organisation.

The intern would be involved in several aspects of research work:

• Helping create a database of case studies of young people who have benefitted from the Light Up Learning programme.
• Conducting a short literature review of research into student-led learning and self-assessment and using this to feed into discussions about how we can strengthen and develop the work our mentors do in schools.
• Using creative strategies to disseminate our evaluation and research findings through social media and our website.

Outputs

As specified above, the outputs for this project would include:

Conducting a literature review of existing research or findings about key areas of our programme, including how self-led learning, self-assessment and mentoring can strengthen students’ engagement with education.

Creating a database of short student case studies, exploring what skills current mentees think they have developed through their learning projects, which can be used to support our future funding applications as well as our annual impact report. 

The intern would also help us to share stories of our work via social media, our website and other platforms.

Timescale

Start and end date flexible.

• Structure:

The ideal arrangement would be to have someone work 2/3 days each week for 6 months though this is something we could discuss with the individual.

Benefits to the Host

We are in an exciting stage of growth as a charity and are hoping to expand our programme to allow us to work in a growing number of schools over the next three years. As part of this, it is essential that we are able to gather evidence of the impact of our programme, to share with potential school partners and funders, as well as having a strong awareness of current research into how interventions like our programme can help close the Scottish attainment gap.

As a small charity with a small team, we have limited ability to do as much research and evaluation as we need to grow. Having a previous SGSAH intern was a wonderful chance for us to strengthen our evaluation processes and we would like to be able to offer another student the chance to build on this work and help us develop on the what we have achieved so far by helping us look forward to how we can grow as an organisation, and offer more young people the chance to discover a love of learning.

Benefits to the Researcher

The researcher will gain valuable professional experience of using research in the third sector.  They will have the chance to gain a deeper understanding of how research and evaluation is used to aid funding applications as well as to inform a charity’s policies and strategy.

With the opportunity to work directly with our mentors, school staff and young people, the researcher will gain experience in writing case studies and develop a range of different research method skills. They will also have the chance to assist with our published impact report, which will be shared widely with funders, schools and educational organisations.

Key Relationships

The researcher will work primarily with Juliet (Head of Mentoring and Operations) on a day-to-day basis. In addition, the researcher will have the chance to work directly with:

- The charity’s founder and Head of Policy

- The board of directors

- The charity’s Development Manager

- Our team of mentors

- The young people who we work with

- A wide range of other organisations and charities with a youth work or educational focus.

Subject Areas

Person Specification

First published: 16 September 2021