Any Livery company, school or educational organisation is welcome to join us . Our aim is to bring Livery companies and schools together to help prepare young people for the world of work.

You may be a Livery company that is interested in joining us, or already a member and looking to offer specific support. Or you may be a school or educational organisation based in London that would welcome support from Livery companies. Please read the sections below to find out more about how you can get involved.

For all general enquiries, please email info@liveryschoolslink.co.uk

The Financial Literacy programme is run by Tower Hamlets Education and Business Partnership (EBP) and is for Year 5 pupils (9+ years old). It is known as the BEE Programme and details are at http://thebp.org/pfl.htm

It's not a huge time commitment: volunteers spend about two hours on each of six or seven days over a period of a year in a primary school helping to deliver a series of workshops, and the sessions are fronted by a teacher from the EBP, so there's no significant preparation required between sessions.

The sessions aim to teach pupils about the principles of finance, banking and enterprise. The volunteers work with a small group of pupils to help them complete the tasks set, and accompany them on a visit to the Bank of England.

The sessions cover, for example:
Making decisions and choices, such as balancing necessities and luxuries, budgeting, and the differences between debit and credit cards.
The world of work, including the concept of earning, how standards of living vary, day-to-day tasks, what a legal contract is, wages, tax and national insurance contributions.
Banking: savings, interest, how money is regulated, etc.
Retail: the services that shops and Post Offices provide, the real cost of goods, household expenses.

The pupils also take part in a project to design and market greetings cards, and then make team presentations to report on their decision-making and results. In this context, they learn about the sort of roles that people have in businesses, overheads and profit, and USPs.

If you would like to volunteer or have any queries about this scheme, please contact Alice.Waddington @thebp.co.uk

The Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators (GAPAN) make an important contribution to education and are stalwart members of Livery Schools Link. John Mason recently sent an open letter to all Clerks appealing for support for both the Golf and the Gliding Programmes. If anyone is interested in following up what John says in his letter, please contact Alison Truphet on alisontruphetlsl@gmail.com

You can read more about our current and upcoming volunteer opportunities in our Volunteering Leaflet and in our Bulletin. You can also read some examples of what other volunteers have done in the past and find out more about the Lord Mayor's Volunteering Initiative. If you wish to volunteer as an individual, please contact Alison Truphet, our Volunteer Coordinator. You can also volunteer with Envision.


School Governance - Adding Value to Children’s Chances

The Context
- In a challenging employment market children need all the help they can get to equip them for life after school.
- There is overwhelming evidence that effective school governance has a positive impact on childrenÂ’s education.
- The need for governor volunteers with transferable skills has never been greater.
- There are 33,000 vacant governor places in schools in England.

A possible solution
School Governors’ One-Stop Shop (SGOSS) is one free service that is NOT too good to be true! With the remit to recruit volunteers with transferable skills to be governors in schools in England, SGOSS has secured places for over 13,000 governor volunteers. The aim is to work in partnership with local authorities and schools, and the added value is the capacity to source skills that governing bodies may lack, or have difficulty finding. There is no charge for any of the SGOSS services. Liverymen and associates of the Livery movement would appear natural candidates to become school governors, and many have already volunteered. Or perhaps there are friends, colleagues, or family members who might be interested?

One of the challenges SGOSS faces, however, is that many schools and their governors are unaware of SGOSS; another is that potential volunteers do not know how to progress their interest; and a third is the perception that London and the Home Counties are probably well served. In any of these scenarios, SGOSS is here to help and advise. SGOSS holds up-to-date vacancy details and once an application is received works with the volunteer to make a mutually beneficial match. Applications can be made electronically at www.sgoss.org.

If you are a governor already, do you have vacancies on your governing body, or the need for a particular skill? If so, SGOSS has launched a new web-based tool to help schools find a school governor with the right skills and talents. The Online Governor Recruitment Service allows schools to register their vacancies, and also provides access to resources for parent governor recruitment. The service is free and can be accessed at www.sgoss.org.uk/schools.


UPDATE - August 2012

Please see below a message to all those involved in Livery Schools Link either directly or indirectly about a recent Governor Impact Survey from SGOSS on the causal link between the effectiveness of governing bodies and pupil performance. It is a salutary reminder that good governors make a difference to young people. If anyone is inspired to think about becoming a school governor, please contact SGOSS direct on www.sgoss.org.uk but I would be delighted to know those of you who are or who are thinking of becoming a school governor.

This SGOSS survey report looked for answers to the perennial question - isthere a demonstrable causal link between the actions of/effectiveness of the governing body and pupil performance? It has been a very tortuous process to get to here, but I am very pleased with the final product. I am now looking for support in highlighting its findings as widely as possible. It is available via this link.

This survey among serving governors recruited by SGOSS sought to collate and evaluate examples of where the governors perceived a causal link between the actions of/effectiveness of their governing body and pupil performance. Providing quantitative verification of such impact is obviously always going to be highly problematic, as even where a governor-sanctioned investment in a particular subject area has been accompanied by a measurable increase in pupil achievement in that same subject, many other factors could have intervened. Nevertheless the SGOSS survey generated a large number of replies, and this data aligns to and supports other earlier studies by way of confirmation that a causal link between the actions of/effectiveness of the governing body and pupil performance can be reasonably inferred.

SGOSS is clear that this report is a collation of a limited number of opinions, and lacks the rigour of comparative research. It is also conscious of a potential respondent bias, leading to exclusively positive responses. Nevertheless, the request for specific instances of impact has resulted in a bank of examples where the respondent believes there is clear link between the actions of the governing body, the quality of education provided by the school, and the performance of the children in the school. On this basis it provides a valuable insight into a key area where publicly available information is currently limited.

Schools wishing to enquire after possible support through Livery Schools Link should first consider the help that those from the public or private sector business, academic, administrative or civil society communities might provide to enhance your students' educational experience and employability. You may wish then to:

1. Identify a Livery Company that may be responsive to your particular need and make contact with them directly through our members list .
2. Contact us via post or email about your school and/or its pupils/students and invite the help of Livery Schools Link in brokering new links or new kinds of links for you.

Conversely, we would welcome your email or letter offering examples of successful school links with the world of employment, crafts, trades and professions (to enable Livery Schools Link to help others with examples of successful practice, which they may care to emulate). A list of partner organisations that may be of interest to schools can be viewed by clicking here.