YWCA NSW Blog

So, I thought given all the talk that was going on in the media around bullying in schools, I might share with you some stories about some kids that we’re working with in schools.

One of them’s a young man by the name of Toby and we met him in 2009 when he was just 15 years old. Toby had seen stuff that no kid really should ever have to see in their childhood and not only had he been physically hurt by some people, but there were lots of mental illness problems within his family and there was addiction issues. He came up in a family that was not supportive. So, Toby, Toby was difficult. The end result was that Toby struggled to stay at school. His kids, the kids in his classroom, wouldn’t have very much to do with him because he always wanted to be at the centre of attention and of course his teachers struggled in a larger classroom to maintain any kind of calm, so he was quite isolated.

Eventually, it was recognised that Toby also had problems with numeracy and literacy and he was diagnosed with ADHD, so there was a whole lot of stuff around this little kid. He left school in year 8.

We spoke to him around that time, when he’d been already kicked out of school and the challenge for the YWCA NSW was basically, we wanted to get him back into a learning environment because he really was at risk of falling out of the system and what that meant for Toby of course was that he would end up either unemployable, and that was probably a pretty obvious thing to happen, but he actually would be socially isolated as well and that would obviously lead to all sorts of issues.

So we got him into a course called Links to Learning which is a NSW Federal Government program for your people aged 12 to 24, which is all about kids who’ve dropped out or are at risk of dropping out of school. And like Toby, these are kids who don’t learn in a formal environment, they don’t learn well in large groups, and they struggle to keep up at not only socially but educationally and it’s often to do with their family environment.

So, we talked to Toby and one of the things he did like doing was going to shopping centres. And he quite liked the idea of maybe working in a shopping centre and so we got him into one of our retail Certificate Two training courses. This course is great course because it’s a mixture of practical things as well as theory. And we knew Toby wasn’t silly, I mean he was a smart little kid, but he didn’t have the ability to really focus for a long time on things. The smaller class sizes in the Links to Learning program were much better for him than it was at high school and he actually started to complete assessments. And the big step forward for Toby was at the end of the first year, and he did struggle throughout that year, but at the end of the first year, he attained a certificate of attainment – and what that really means is that he actually completed something for the very first time in his life.

He also got some work experience and he got some really positive feedback for that work experience and he’s, he’s in a bit of space now. So he’s achieved something, he’s got some work experience under his belt, he’s working on the anger management on conflict resolution skills as he continues to go to the Links to Learning program.

This doesn’t sound like a big step forward, but it’s a huge step forward for a kid like Toby. And the good thing is he’s actually been accepted back into the mainstream schooling process. So he’s back at school, he’s doing year 10, he’s on different ADHD medication and it’s almost like that year out almost gave him the break that he needed. And I thought, given all the conversations that are going around about bullying, it doesn’t always come down to a huge things that happens and it hits the media, there are a lot of kids in schools who take just little steps forward and just they, they need that break to be able to, to do something with their lives. So I thought I might share that one with you.