Project case study - St Mary the Virgin Church in Wales Primary School

Taking positive steps to ensure all diverse members of the community feel integrated

About the project

For the past six years ‘St Mary the Virgin Church in Wales Primary School’ in Cardiff has been taking positive steps to make sure every member of its diverse population feels integrated. Many pupils are from Somalia and around two thirds of its population are of the Muslim faith.

This is why in 2000, the school set up its ‘PURL Mentoring’ project. This is a scheme which sees older, multi-ethnic volunteers from the local community forming friendships with pupils and acting as role models.

Approach to mentoring

Teacher and project co–ordinator Judith Griffiths says: “Our target is to have 10 mentors working with a primary school aged child for one hour, one day a week. We match languages where it is possible so that the relationship can take place in a comfortable linguistic environment.”

The project focuses on the personal development of pupils and also looks at improving and maintaining attendance and general motivation. Judith says that one of the main ways in which this is achieved is by listening in a non judgmental way to what each youngster has to say.

Benefits

Positive feedback has shown the scheme is working well, especially where the relationship between mentor and pupil has been sustained over a long period of time.

However, as Judith explains, the school has found that finding mentors can be quite a difficult task. “Recruiting and training mentors is a huge challenge. Word of mouth is effective, but we have to use other methods such as the local English language centre and local newspapers.”