This project was funded by Research England’s participatory research fund. We worked with parents, headteachers, teachers, and other community leaders (librarian, local councillor, community centre managers, local charity heads) to co-create a summer school for children the July before they started compulsory education. Participatory research of this kind is essential to design an engaging intervention that would meet the needs of the local community. We conducted interviews and focus groups with the people identified above and then ran a pilot summer school intervention in July 2022. We learned a lot from our pilot and discussions with people in the community. We are now making an application to run a full-scale intervention in 2023-2027.
Research team: Prof Holly Joseph, Dr Daisy Powell and Prof Carol Fuller
Research assistants: Roohul Fatima Syed Razi Husain. Katrina Dayanc and Ish Aa Sujau