Study support: Opening minds with out-of-hours and out-of-school learning

My background, values and beliefs I am a Senior Lecturer and Head of Education and Society at a university in Liverpool. My strong commitment to the principles of study support developed while creating placements for undergraduate students with primary schoolchildren. After seeing children benefit from a few hours a week of well-led, but essentially self-directed, learning outside their normal classroom situation, I became committed to using study support projects to help children become motivated and enthusiastic about learning in a way that helped their attainment and attitude in formal classes. Since I started in 2005, I have helped to organise and set up hundreds of study support clubs in schools and then, as wider appropriate settings became available, through schemes such as Playing For Success at Everton and Liverpool football clubs, Jaguar’s Partnership for Learning, and at a number of community, museum and library settings across the northwest of England. More recently, I have been involved in developing a series of sustainable themed primary school study clubs run as school businesses. I am particularly interested in the effects on pupils’ self-esteem of learning in study clubs in wider settings than schools.