What You’ll Do

It is a cliché, but everyday really is different.

First of all you will attend a two-week basic training academy.  This is all about preparing you with information about what it means to be a City Year corps member and equipping you with the basic knowledge you need to work in a school.  It’s also a great way to get to know your fellow new recruits and City Year staff.

You will then form a new team of between seven and ten teammates. These are the people you will work most closely with throughout your time at City Year.

Your team will serve in a single school (or perhaps a pair of nearby schools) between Monday and Thursday throughout the entire school day. You will be at school in the morning to welcome the children and run after-school activities in the afternoons.  You will do a range of hands-on tutoring and mentoring activities and support the teaching staff by monitoring children’s attendance, behaviour and curriculum performance.  You will often eat with the children, play at break times and generally become a highly visible personality within the school.  You might be the first and last person a child sees during the school day.

At school you will work with children and young people by:

• Becoming a role model and an integral part of the school team
• Provide one-to-one mentoring and tutoring support – for e.g. helping children progress with their reading
• Assisting teachers in the classroom – for e.g. acting as the eyes and ears for teachers or concentrating on a small group of focus children
• Leading after school activities – for e.g. see our Starfish programme
• Running workshops on important social issues, such as poverty, health, respect
• Organising and leading community action projects, stimulating wider community involvement – for e.g. transforming an old derelict playground into a safe and new environment

Fridays are very different.  You will attend our HQ in Islington, or our sponsors’ offices, where we train together and run our Life After City Year programme. Friday is a good time to catch up with everyone else on the corps and for sharing tips and ideas.  You could be doing a training course relating to your time in school, or be having a mentoring session from one of our corporate partners, or work shadowing a senior businessperson in the City, or picking up tips on how to pass entrance tests to FTSE 100 companies.

We take pride in being professional and working hard but we also have fun and support each other to develop.  Fridays are special because it’s about coming back together and stretching your mind (not that working in a school is anything but challenging!).

“I thought I would come into this just as an experience in schools and I’ll put up with the rest of it, but it’s turned out that the experience of being in schools is the smallest amount of what I’ve actually gained, it’s been a very, very good year, actually it’s been one of the best years.” –  2010 corps member

“City Year has helped me to be more sociable because at the beginning I was actually a little scared of meeting new people.  My self-confidence has definitely gone up because of like just talking in public again, meeting new people, trying new things, it’s just really enjoyable.” – 2010 corps member

• What you’ll get »