Intent
Gateway provides our students with a programme of activities to enhance their awareness and access of their environment and wider community around them. Gateway encourages the students to be active, curious and to ultimately achieve the Mencap Gateway Award from Bronze to Gold level. Students are encouraged to learn new skills which can boost self-confidence and help them to develop a sense of purpose.
Implementation
Students have different categories to select activities from depending on the level of the award they are participating in. Students are responsible to research, plan and participate in topics from categories including:-
- Lifestyle
- Hobbies
- Challenge
- Cultures
- Communication
- Volunteering
- Healthy living
Within each area students have the opportunity to experience a variety of learning experiences including:-
- investigate different activities that they may wish to pursue as a hobby
- to promote a healthy eating and lifestyle routine
- research cultures across the globe and explore how different cultures celebrate events of significance to them
- research an organisation that they would like to volunteer for and commit to an agreed period of volunteering
- Produce a project on communication looking at the array of methods people use e.g. sign language, PECs, voice boards, Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)
- Planning, booking and participating in different sports/keep fit activities
- Participating in a challenging activity that is unfamiliar and requires planning and training for.
Impact
The Gateway students have shown a genuine understanding of how working as a team can make a positive impact on their motivation, their sense of achievement and their abilities to perform under pressure. They have participated in challenges that have tested them physically and mentally and with their ever-evolving peer support they have accomplished all of these. The awards are designed to be adaptable and diverse in their content reflecting the students who attempt and achieve them.
Volunteering projects within the community such as the Country Park have enabled us to establish new and strong links for future initiatives.
