How the ‘Students in Schools’ scheme works
The ‘Students in Schools’ scheme is a long standing programme in which our students volunteer to spend time helping out in local schools. Typically they will make 10 weekly visits of 1 or 2 hours although many students do stay longer. Our volunteers may be undergraduate or postgraduate, from any discipline and often help in subjects outside their area of study such as art, music, sport or general literacy.
Many overseas students also offer native language support to children whose first language is not English as well as bringing a different cultural perspective to the classroom. Recent students have provided support in a wide range of languages including Mandarin, Greek, Arabic, Romanian, Polish, Japanese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Russian.
When your school decides to participate in the ‘Students in Schools’ scheme, you will be asked nominate a ‘link’ teacher who will be the main point of contact between the University and your school. Your link teacher will co-ordinate and submit your school’s requests for volunteers. You can submit as many requests as you like for any subject or activity including EAL language support and after school and lunchtime clubs. Whilst we cannot guarantee to meet your requests we will do our very best to find you as many suitable volunteers as possible.
DBS Checks
All of our volunteers attend a mandatory training course which includes a section on safeguarding. Unless they already have a recent DBS certificate, we will submit DBS checks for all students before they start in a school.
How we notify you of your volunteers
After students have provided us with their preferences, submitted their DBS application, or shown us their existing DBS certificate, they will be allocated to an appropriate school for a specific lesson or time block. At this point, you will be provided with a detailed list of your volunteer(s) and a proposed start date. We do ask you to confirm or decline your volunteers within 5 working days so that we can find an alternative school for any volunteer that you are unable to host.
When the scheme operates
Most students volunteer to participate in the Autumn and Spring terms. We do not recruit students for the summer term because of exams, however, some volunteers will still be in schools during the summer term.
Register your Interest
If your school would like to participate, please register your interest here and we will be in touch.
More Information
If you have any questions or would like any more information, we would be happy to visit you or to have a phone or email conversation. Please contact Judy MacDevitt on 0118 378 6144 or at
j.macdevitt@reading.ac.uk