The Yorkshire Trust

The Yorkshire Trust

To be quite honest, my first few weeks at the Yorkshire Trust didn’t involve much teaching work. A paid member of staff, who liaised with all of the partners and funding organisations, took care of the weekly class and I carried out various other duties.

A lot of my time was spent opening and closing the premises, keeping the place clean, tidy and well organised, in addition to undertaking a wide variety of tasks as a receptionist, typist, office administrator and other job descriptions that might be listed under “Jack of all trades”.

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One particular responsibility was to supervise the use of the ICT Suite. On some days, this was the venue for the formal classes and at other times it was used quietly as a drop in centre by a handful of regular visitors so, once I had switched the computers on, I was very rarely disturbed.

After school, however, the ICT Suite took on a completely different character.This internet access was meant for serous students to do school work, but the reality was that it was mainly a ‘hang out’ for a wide variety of boisterous teenagers, whose life revolved around Bebo.

Like many organisations, the Yorkshire Trust relies on volunteers and I was soon able to train a few of these to carry out the various tasks that I had been doing and concentrate on my teaching work. This had become more important, because the teacher had left to go to another job, leaving me by myself.

I conducted initial interviews, which satisfied government guidelines and, with a whiteboard and photocopies from official manuals that I had found, whilst organising the library, I gave 2 hour lessons on a weekly basis. The students came from all sorts of places and had extremely varied levels of English.

The front entrance

One time, I had to teach the English alphabet and it was not easy. I had to joke that, unless they concentrated, we would have to learn Chinese characters instead. A local takeaway proprietor, who regularly attended the classes, thoroughly agreed with me and everyone burst out in laughter. 

Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Zimbabwe were all represented, as well as various French speaking countries in Africa, whose names I can’t quite remember. 

Eastwood, the area which the Yorkshire Trust mainly serves, is one of the most deprived areas in Rotherham but it is very rich in language.

I organised 1 to 1 lessons with a few of my students and we had some very good conversations about the various ways that people are treated in their respective countries.