Award winning Project

Wilberforce Sixth Form College is celebrating having been chosen to receive the inaugural national Sixth Form Colleges Association award for ‘Enrichment and Employability’.

Wilberforce Sixth Form College is celebrating having been chosen to receive the inaugural national Sixth Form Colleges Association award for ‘Enrichment and Employability’. The De Vere Jubilee Conference Centre, in Nottingham, was the setting for the SFCA Awards Ceremony, the first time an awards ceremony has been dedicated solely to the hard work and talent of staff at sixth form colleges and designed to showcase their exceptional practice.

Wilberforce Principal, David Cooper, was delighted to receive the award on behalf of the College from the Further Education Commissioner Richard Atkins in recognition of the innovative work of the College in preparing young people to secure places in higher Education and employment. The Award took particular note of the college’s ground-breaking “Seeds of Change” Project. This inclusive project encourages students to make healthy and positive lifestyle choices. Students are made aware of the origins of their food through allotments across the College site, and they even have the chance to eat this home grown produce on pizzas baked in the College’s own pizza oven.

“Our ‘Seeds of Change’ Project has become so successful it’s grown into several strands involving students and staff from right across the college. It’s truly achieved the original aims of identifying and challenging the consequences of choice on health and promoting healthy lifestyle choices by developing an entrepreneurial culture. The whole Wilberforce community now think more carefully about their food, health and lifestyle choices and to this end we are holding a Staff Wellbeing Day at the end of term.” comments Principal, David Cooper.

The project was launched in 2015 by creating an ‘Edible Campus’ with sponsorship gained from William Jackson Group. Bottle greenhouses and planted raised beds were created to grow fruit, veg and herbs across the Saltshouse Road site. With several successful funding bids from Hull Community Fund, KCOM Community Grant and the Big Lottery the project has moved onto more ambitious plans. These include a ‘Pop up Pizza’ Company, run by students utilising produce grown at Wilberforce plus a modular building, supplied by Space Projects UK Ltd, known as ‘The Union’ which acts as a hub, a place where students can hold meetings, concerts and carry out entrepreneurial activities.

‘Seeds of Change’ will culminate this year with a community food festival ‘F-east’ in September, to which local residents, primary school children, the elderly from nearby care homes and local businesses will be invited.
Social Science Teacher, Tim Blackburn, who has been the main instigator of the project with help from Study Support Manager, Jill Naylor, says….
‘I am delighted to have been involved with the Seeds of Change Project and to have received this national award. We are inspiring the next generation to look forward to a long and rewarding future. From September 2017 we will be encouraging even more of our young people, to celebrate life by joining in to grow, produce and sell ‘real’ food. Everybody wants to feel great and the best way to achieve this is by eating home grown goodness. All money made will be reinvested into developing The Union as a cool place for young adults to meet, relax and organise ways in which we can grow stronger together.”

• inspiring self-development through cooperation

• promoting health, wellbeing and hope 

• overcoming health inequalities as a community

Hello, hallo, hej, hola,witaj, bonjour, privet, sveikas, tja, konnichichiwa, moin, boas, shwmae, ahnyong, sawubona, buon giorno, salaam alekum, shalom, ni hao–  and welcome to the Wilberforce College Seeds of Change Project!

We are delighted that you have taken the time to visit our website. We hope that you find inspiration and ideas that you can grow in your community.

Please share with us your thoughts and plans,  wherever you are in the world we’d love to hear from you and link up. Contact us via the form at the bottom of this page and share your story with us.

We are delighted to announce that thanks to our successful Big Lottery bid, we are pioneering an exciting new approach to challenging health inequalities as a community. We are creating a dedicated learner focused idea germinating hub, where the prospect of a healthy future will grow. Initially we will encourage our students to take ownership of this space as a creative common room, which they can develop as a place to organise as their own.

They may choose to start off by thinking of the Union (previously advertised as being called The Germinator)* as a place to take some time out and relax amongst friends or organise a college band gig or party. However,  in order for this to work the students will have to decide how they are going to organise and run the facility, so that it embodies the college ethos of innovation, cooperation and meritocracy.

From its inception the Union will be presented as a student led base from which to nurture; self efficacy, positive lifestyle choices, entrepenerialism and hope. The Venue will provide an excellent space for young people to gravitate towards in order to help equip themselves with the skills and attitudes required to deal with the challenges of growing up in the early 21st century.

It will be a hub where many of the issues related to mental and physical health, highlighted by our own Healthy Lifestyle survey, can be addressed, by providing an information base for agencies such CAMHS, Stop Smoking Service, Refresh and many others whom we have established links with. From this hub ideas and ambition will radiate outwards to facilitate the transition between late childhood to the mindset and actions of young adulthood.

Over 100, 000 shipping containers pass through the port of Hull each year, bringing with them consumer goods and products from around the planet. The centrality of these containers to our way of life is frequently overlooked. In the 17 million containers that exist worldwide, nearly all trade is moved at sea.

By using the design of a  shipping container we are translating this idea into a locally mobile unit that will promote positive lifestyle choices, we translate such a symbol of globalisation into an instrument of local transformation. A container that usually transports the next generation of ‘gotta-have’ technology and stuff, can be transformed in the locality and reassigned to inspire wellbeing, self-efficacy and inner contentment that is rooted in the local community.

Hull’s proud history and ongoing involvement with international trade can be both celebrated and harnessed to shape a more equitable and healthier future for the communities we serve.

*( we have decided to rename our unit “The Union”.  Student research found that the ” The Germinator” would be called “The Germ” and as such sounded “dirty” !

The Seeds of Change ‘pop up’ Pizza Company.

Everybody loves pizza and although it can be viewed as a carb laden cheesefest it can also be used as a vessel to tempt the uninitiated into sampling fresh tasty vegetables, herb, spices and fruit (chillies, tomatoes and pepper). The pop up pizza company will be the organising principle around which student interest in food can be galvanised and open up a wider interest in quality food production.

Alongside the Germinator we are setting up a ‘pop up’ pizza company to inspire an entrepreneurial spirit that engages with the idea of creating a proactive healthier community.

Our pizzas will be topped with freshly grown produce grown right here on Wilberforce College campus, where we will be emphasising a healthy toppings ethos. In doing so we will stimulate a mindful internal college market where food production and growth are reintegrated in young minds. Once established we will take this unit to wider community events like the Freedom Festival.

Alongside the ‘pop up’ pizza company, we are setting up the Seeds of Change Pizza Garden,  which will produce many of the ingredients required to make the pizzas. Thanks to NHS Hull clinical Commissioning Group funding and our links with Rooted in Hull we are  building a greenhouse that will protect our harvest from the increasingly unpredictable climate.

The pizza industry is worth millions of pounds to the British economy a point well worth considering when inspiring the young people of East Hull to imagine a life of  economic growth and success. We will set the Pop up Pizza Company as a cooperative that can be used by the students to raise funds for the development of the Germinator and to host events within it. This way our learners will be rewarded for their ambition and hard work.

F-East- September 2017.

To celebrate our success, we are holding a community food and positive lifestyle festival next summer, where we will invite the children with whom we have links, the Bayswater tenants and our new neighbours in the social housing estate, currently under completion adjacent to college. We are calling this festival F-east, playing on our location in the east of Hull and food! We will link our festivities with our City of Culture status and the rejuvenation of attitudes towards this region, this initiative will inspire.

F-east will involve the sharing of food, dance, art and music. We will be selling student made pizzas at the ‘pop up’ Seeds of Change pizza company and offering a wide range of locally produced food at stalls yet to be announced, will bring our community closer together- eating produce, grown here at college and other local food projects. We will celebrate the diversity of our community young and old by promoting social cohesion and healthier longer lives.

First year BTEC Level 3 Performing Arts students will create a new Seeds of Change Dance that they will be perform at F-east for all those in attendance. Music students will also create a piece of work that embodies the Seeds of Change mission that will also be performed. Art and Design students will further develop their involvement in the project by producing work that reflects and promotes our project to be displayed around the college site. Health, Caring and Early Years will continue to nurture their Hungry Caterpillar sensory garden and the plants that are growing up. The list of involvement keeps on growing- far too many to explain here in full.

The theme of Hull City of Culture in September is ‘Freedom’. Our Celebrate Big Lottery funded event will enable us to project forward our message of proactive positive lifestyle choices to new students enrolling for study at Wilberforce College 2017- 2018 at the heart of the communities we serve.

We would like you to join in the evolution of our community that is bringing food, nature and art to the minds of its young people. We at the Wilberforce College Seeds of Change project are excited to share with you our ambitious and radical plans to transform lives in East Hull.

We are already inspiring a food culture and healthy lifestyle revolution that will soon rock this city to its core!

Driven by our conviction to drive down the health inequalities that have inflicted our locality for too long, we are bringing together individuals as a collective of self empowered decision makers. Taking great pride in the generous spirit of our local population, we are grounded in the earth of East Hull, nurturing a lasting legacy for future generations.

We are already embracing the four seasons by growing roots that will forge a healthy lifetime of routes towards freedom and health equality, enabling our learners to spread word of this great city as they travel the world.

We have a three pronged approach which sets out a narrative and examples of creativity that promote the idea that socially progressive practice can be applied with direct action. We are demonstrating the ease with which a collective response to health inequalities can be incorporated in and outside of subject disciplines.

1) We are inspiring our young people to ‘funk up their junk’ and grow fruit and vegetables on college grounds by creating an edible campus, in upcycling waste objects like old filing cabinets and delivery pallets into containers that can be used to grow food. Discarded waste turns into a visible metaphor for an upcycled food culture and the rebirth of the city.

Recently partnered up with Rooted in Hull, we and are looking at ways that an LED growing unit can be developed on site to galvanise a new generation of urban youth to take an interest in producing high tech, environmentally sustainable food- here in East Hull.

2) We are setting up a pop up pizza company to nurture an entrepreneurial spirit and employ peer group promotion of a food culture in college and beyond. We have already started the pizza garden where raw ingredients are growing. This will have much wider impact when we take it out to the local primary schools we now have developed  links with.

3) edible urban jungle It is in this third dimension of our project that we are keen to celebrate our achievements, by creating an artistic interpretation of an eco-therapeutic space, fruit and nut trees will grow alongside open spaces for art and drama productions to exhibit and take place.

We are self funding as there is no money available for this project from the government (yet). Despite this we have cross-curricular involvement that in just one year include five departments:  Art and Design, Performing Arts (Dance), Health and Caring, Engineering and Foundation.

We are often encouraged by the prevailing political tenet, to see the young people we serve as separate consumers of education, dislocated from their locality or wider structural and economic forces. From this perspective young people are free to make their own choices about everything they eat, think or do. This hegemonic lense encourages us to see individuals as consumers of their own bespoke lifestyles and as victors or victims of their unique decisions.

Although such an individualistic account of life has many truly liberating dimensions, there are arguably far greater social forces at work which shape collective group or cultural responses that are shared by many people. In many parts of Hull, like in similar towns and cities nationally, apathetic attitudes towards positive lifestyle choices have been learnt and are endlessly recirculated as a means of coping with poverty and the structural replication of low self-expectation. This has and continues to lead towards the manifestation of self-fulfilling prophecies of low wage employment and in many cases the adoption of negative attitudes towards lifestyle choices that result in poor health.

We could in contrast celebrate those young people who make great choices and embrace the opportunities afforded by meritocratic success at fantastic institutions such Wilberforce College Sixth Form College that lead onwards from A-Levels/ BTECs to a degree and then a well paid and rewarding career. Although we embrace everyone in our project, it is those who are most disadvantaged that we seek to impress the most.

Since the industrial revolution individuals who found themselves alongside one another doing manual labour, grew together as collectives. United by the heavy demands of low pay and the limited prospects of promotion, lifestyles of instant gratification developed, where a ‘live for the moment’ mentality began to make choices that expressed social solidarity. One highly visible example of such a ‘cultural choice’  that exists in many poorer regions such as Hull, is that smoking remains an expression of  liberty, creating time and space away from the boss and the demands of work. In this light food choices can also be viewed as a cultural form of resistance to structural inequalities, where the promotion of healthier options are often collectively rejected as signs of an oppressive ‘nanny’ state where government health advice represents hometime instructions from the boss.

There is much academic research that clearly identifies the links between family income and attitudes towards education, work and health. In common with many economically deprived regions of the UK, the less affluent of Hull have not historically shared the attitudes of the more wealthy towards deferred gratification and future planning. Such monied values include aspirations towards educational attainment,  career progression and the selection of lifestyle choices that will ultimately predicate a long retirement period drinking Chianti under the Tuscan sun. In today’s economic climate life for the least advantaged in society is a day to day event, that is increasingly finding it a struggle to make ends meet and put food on the table each week.

From many sociological perspectives these issues and more, sketch out the largely unspoken ethnographies of the individuals we endeavour to inspire and lead outwards towards an aspirational future horizon. From this backdrop the Seeds of Change Project paints a landscape where we physically and positively reconnect the young people we serve with the proverb that you reap what you sow. By promoting a reconnection with the earth we naturally connect with each other as humans.

Finally and on top of all this, there are countless well evidenced scientific studies that clearly illustrate the links between poor diet, behavioural problems and limited physical, emotional and intellectual development that when we tackle these, college wide achievement is sure to share in the many benefits of such an approach.

The issues addressed here are but an abstract simplification of a whole complexity of socio-economic and political issues that have been discussed for decades and more. The simple fact is that unless we do something now to address the growing health inequalities of our age, nothing positive will happen in our lifetime. It is therefore our firm belief that what is needed is a grassroot movement that inspires our young people to seize the moment and make informed choices that will enable them to build the bright and healthy future they deserve.

At the Seeds of Change Project we are working hard to inspire members of the Wilberforce community to take hold of this initiative and grow a Wilberforce wide collaborative project. To achieve this we are going to make healthy food socially desirable. We are developing an ‘edible campus’ that encourages our community of learners to see their food literally growing before their eyes. By doing this we will encourage them to reconnect with food in a more holistic and thoughtful way everyday at the heart of college.

From this our project will sow the seed that growing food is at the root of almost everything we need. By reconnecting our community with food, we know that we can grow strong again by ending food poverty and inspiring cooperative social and economic activity. At Wilberforce we are making it happen!

As with anything worthwhile, the hardest part is getting started. We did this in Easter 2015, by turning a piece of grass by the staff carpark into ‘F Block Orchard’. We picked these apple and pear trees up from a discount supermarket for a few quid each- bargain.

Later that year we launched our project to the whole college in style, by commissioning local graffiti artist ‘Si2’. With his assistance we created a display that showcased our ideas and expressed our ambition. The display featured fruit, vegetables and herbs growing out of bits and bobs that were either begged, borrowed or found. Two highlights included an upcycled filing cabinet filled with chilli plants and an old delivery pallet converted into a mediterranean herb planter.

We are continuing to work with Si2 to help create an interesting, fun and youthful vibe. His graffiti art helped launch Hull’s successful bid for the 2017 City of Culture, so he has an excellent track record for attracting success. His latest designs can be found on the bus shelter outside of college, it is deep.

Following on from our opening exhibition, we identified a second piece of land that we could cultivate and turn into a food production area. We called this location ‘Base Camp’, like mountaineers setting off on an uphill trek towards the summit of a mountain, climbing this simile as a metaphor for the improved food choices we are aiming to elevate.

Central to our project we are setting up a cooperative pizza company to inspire an entrepreneurial spirit that engages with the idea of creating a proactive healthier community. Through gentle encouragement our pizzas will be topped with fresh produce grown right here on Wilberforce College campus, where we will be emphasising a vegetarian ethos. In doing so we will stimulate a mindful internal college market where food production and growth are reintegrated in young minds. This way our students will be at the heart of growing, producing and promoting the fingerlicking great taste of fresh pizza.

What is truly amazing about the Seeds of Change project is that we have gained so much support from departments across the college.There are now embedded elements of the project in Art and Design, Foundation, Health and Caring and Performing Arts (Dance).

BTEC Art and Design students have put together some thoughtful designs which encapsulate our ambitions to spread the word and make the college grounds a brighter place.

Foundation students have been strongly involved from the very start, these young grafters have been responsible for clearing, digging and planting many of our crops- keep it up guys!

In BTEC Performing Arts (Dance) students have created a Seeds of Change Dance. This dance has been performed several times as part of our partnership with a local primary school.  Three groups of 10 year old students from Ings Primary School recently visited Wilberforce College and were entertained, informed and educated by our dancers about the importance of healthy lifestyle choices- Seeds of Change style.

In the Health and Caring Department, students are busy putting together a sensory garden based on the Hungry Caterpillar- sweet.

So as you can see what we are talking about here is not just food its a lifestyle!

Many students from different curriculum areas are getting involved in the project. Students studying BTec L3 Performing Arts have devised a Seeds of Change dance to inform and educate young children about the importance of healthy eating and having a healthy lifestyle, such as the danger of smoking. As part of their course, the students had to devise the choreography for the 30 minute performance, design the costumes, set, select backing music and perform to an audience.

Pupils from Gillshill and Ings Primary Schools are visiting the college during April and May to see the performance and to take part in a range of activities to encourage them to keep up a healthy lifestyle and eat healthy foods – including fitness sessions, quizzes and an art project.

Well done to all the students for their hard work, commitment and enthusiasm. The consensus from Ings pupils was that it was “awesome”!

The ‘Seeds of Change dancers’ on the back row are: (left to right) Keeley Forward, Georgia Goldspink, Stacey Foster, Hannah Smart, Alannah Turner-Evans, Penny Wilkinson, Neve Jameson and Katie Hunt

We are assisting the residents of Bayswater Court in creating a garden area for local residents to get together and socialise as a community. We are bringing older and younger members of our neighbourhood together! More news to follow…