Press Release: Students from Coventry show community spirit

Coventry’s Lord Mayor has had help decorating his new office from teenagers in the city.

A group of 11 youngsters staged a London 2012-inspired event in the City Arcade to raise money for charity – while contributing to the community and working towards essential qualifications.

Lord Mayor Cllr Keiran Mulhall – who took up the role just last month – was in attendance to celebrate the students’ work and he even bought some of the art and music that was up for auction.

Community Games aim to bring communities together by exploring culture and heritage through sport, art and music and this particular event was part of the Wider Key Skills Course managed by Coventry-based training and education organisation Progressive Educational Tools (PET).

Students who complete the intensive, ten-day programme – which involves a range of community-driven and career planning tasks – gain the equivalent of two and-a-quarter grade B GCSEs.

The year 10 students on this course were from the Warwickshire Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) which helps children outside mainstream education attain qualifications before reaching school leaving age.

PET run similar courses up and down the country but this was the first time it had incorporated Community Games – and Charlie Diston, the lead trainer on the course, felt it was a huge success.

She said: “We work all across the country but the culmination of the programme involved a Community Games event that showed off just what Coventry and Warwickshire is all about. Learning about culture, diversity, legacy and being inspired by 2012 all contributed to the learning programme.


“The young people were delighted to show off to parents and VIP guests the amazing amount of work that they had completed in just two weeks.

“They should be really proud of what they have done, these skills will give them the chance to show the world just how capable they are and although I hope to see them again, I would personally love to wish them the very best for their future. They have proved to me that they are outstanding and that they all deserve a medal.

“The course challenges students with a problem solving task with the aim to raise money for charity and they tackled this brilliantly by organising and marketing the event as well as producing graffiti artwork a CD to auction off.

“Every single item was sold by the end of the day, the money was raised for a worthy cause and everyone was extremely impressed with the standard of their work.

“We hadn’t used the Community Games as the basis of the culmination of this course before but after the success of this event, it is definitely something we would consider doing again.”

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