The Prince’s Trust

The Prince’s Trust course helps young people get back into education, training or work, and encourages them to become the person they want to be, to succeed in life and to realise their full potential. It lasts for 12 weeks and everything done during it builds up towards a City & Guilds Qualification.

What the Trust does

The Prince’s Trust seeks to address problems caused by youth unemployment, crime and inequality. It does this by giving practical and financial support to the young people who need it most, through developing key skills, confidence and motivation, and helping young people go where they want to in life – eg work, education or training.

The Trust runs programmes that help young people learn how to take responsibility for their lives. This means that they realise that they can build a future for themselves rather than stay in their current life if this is not what they want.

Programmes on offer

The Trust offers various programmes to young people, as this information from their website shows:

• The Enterprise Programme provides money and support to help young people start up in business.
• The Team Programmeis a 12-week personal development course, offering work experience, qualifications, practical skills, community projects and a residential week.
• Get intosare short courses offering intensive training and experience in a specific sector to help young people get a job.
• Development Awardsare small grants to enable young people to access education, training or work.
• Community Cash Awardsare grants to help young people set up a project that will benefit their community.
• xl clubsgive 14-16 year olds who are at risk of truanting, exclusion and underachievement a say in their education. They aim to improve attendance, motivation and social skills.

The Prince’s Trust

My experience

This is one person’s story of their time on the course.

I took part in the Prince’s Trust Oxford Team 4 and, right from the start, I got stuck in and helped to plan all the food menus and kit lists for the residential, as well as playing some ice-breaker games.

The residential

On week 2 we went on residential to Ferny Croft in the New Forest to do team-building activities.

The games started with hoops made out of ropes that we had to squeeze through, then running and catching pieces of papers. It ended with a volcano game, where two pieces of rope are put close to each other and gradually moved further apart, while a pen is passed across to the other side. We got the gap to be at least two meters wide and when we passed the pen for the last time, it was like we had won the football championships! Everyone was jumping around, hugging each other and congratulating them. Even the Team Leaders were jumping around saying, “You can always do more than you think!”, which became a motto that we adopted.

Some of the other activities we did were rock climbing, the assault course, crate stack and archery.

Community project

When we came back in week 3 we concentrated on our community project and work experience. We had to find a project that interested everyone and we went to the allotments in Rose Hill to rebuild some sheds that had been burnt down. It was exciting to see the smile on the faces of people who use the allotments and to have the stereotype of young people washed away.

We also went to BLAP (Blackbird Leys Adventure Playground) to help raise awareness of its current situation and to start the ball rolling to Bring Back BLAP.

Team challenge

Team Challenge covered weeks 9–11 and involved taking a different perspective on helping others. We looked at taking out disabled children to the park or going to an elderly people’s home to read, talk and perhaps play bingo with them. This helped reopen my eyes to the different walks of life and how everyone is affected by different things. In week 12 we gave a presentation to friends and family about what we’d done on the course and to show how far we had come since the beginning.

Personal progress

The course had a huge difference on me and my life. It taught me to be more positive, it got me back into a routine, and it helped me to deal with many personal problems. My anger is now fully under control and I have a direction that I want to follow in life. I have started putting my own photography portfolio together so I can apply for college courses and jobs. It made me concentrate on being the person I want to be and not worry about what people think about me.

Vicki Jarrett did work experience at Spired.com as part of her Princes Trust Team course.

Find out more…

• The Prince’s Trust – visit to find out more about the Trust and how it could help you.
• Call 0800 842 842 to find out about programmes near you
• Contact Tom Codling on 07891052314 or email thomas.codling@oxfordshire.gov.uk