As our Advantaged Thinking Learning Community (ATLC) programme heads towards the end of its second year, the team has been focusing on how our new online platform can capture meaningful impact.
What is the Advantaged Thinking Learning Community?
The project – set to launch fully in spring 2025 – aims to create a dynamic learning environment, which will be shaped by the Advantaged Thinking Foyer community and available to all young people entering Foyers. The online platform will provide an environment for young people to thrive, with space for collaboration, learning and personal development in a supportive community they can help to build.
We hope young people will not only learn on the platform, but feel empowered to create content too, taking ownership of their own progress and becoming active participants in the community. There will also be space for staff learning, with specific courses designed for this audience.
Examples of courses under development:
- Practical support guides, e.g. how to use washing machines onsite
- Foyer welcome booklets and virtual tours
- Mental health and wellbeing courses
- Advantaged Thinking learning modules
Capturing Impact – what have we achieved so far?
We have been working with Alice, our Impact and Insight Consultant, to explore the possibilities for capturing data, including the impact of engagement with the platform, and charting young people’s personal development and learning journeys more widely.
Alice began research with The Foyer Federation team and Foyer staff from the ATLC leadership team, and explored our Theory of Change model. She used this insight to map three key impact areas:
1. Employment / work readiness
2. Personal wellbeing
3. Learning
Using these, Alice explored the functionality of the online platform and created initial first draft impact surveys and logs.
How have young people been involved?
In August, The Foyer Fed team delivered a workshop with young consultants to explore their understanding of success and their attitudes towards learning. The interactive workshop showcased brilliant ideas and perspectives; validating parts of the surveys that have already been built and also offering additional insights.
Young people also met with Alice on a one-to-one basis to test and re-design the surveys to be as meaningful and appealing as possible. The young consultants shared vital context which had important implications for survey design and the practicalities of how to engage young people in impact measurement activities.
A key piece of feedback was that the surveys needed to feel less like a form and more like a supportive tool for young people to situate and focus themselves when they first arrive, and as a progress tracking tool through their journey at the Foyer.
Now and next?
After this initial design phase, the plan for impact measurement tools have developed into three areas:
- To begin with a one-off ‘all about me quiz’ completed within the first month of signing up to the platform and moving into a Foyer. This survey will ask the young person questions about areas of interest, confidence, learning experiences, goals and strengths.
- It will be followed by repeated short surveys every 2-3 months. These will focus on ‘my learning journey’, including questions about learning experiences and attitudes to learning, and ‘my strengths and abilities’, including questions about self-confidence and motivation.
- As well as these surveys, there will be ‘unlimited logs’ which young people can complete however often they wish. Here learners can complete a ‘win tracker’ and ‘learning log’, celebrating achievements big and small. These can be completed through the platform but also offline, using template log documents.
These tools will join with passive data collection (such as courses completed and course feedback) to give a rich picture of the impact of the ATLC platform.
Our next job is to integrate feedback, from Foyer staff and young people, into re-designing the impact tools above. Once this is completed we will begin a wider piloting of these tools. Here we hope to see what is working well and where there is room for improvement, taking onboard feedback from more young people.
Thank you so much to Alice for all her hard work on this impact work. Her expertise has been invaluable.
How can you get involved?
All staff and young people in the Foyer Fed network are welcome to join the ATLC Leadership Team and help shape the future of the platform. If you’re interested in joining our Leadership Team and influencing our impact capture work, please contact [email protected].
