How Scottish school kids are keeping their peers safe

“We found out when the police turned up at the door, said "your son's gone", and left us. That was it. No family liaison officer, nobody wanting to talk to us. To cut a long story short we thought that we don't want anybody else going through the kind of scenario that we've just gone through.

“So we decided that we would be there for people and would campaign for change, and, that's what we did. We started the campaign and raised awareness, telling people how to protect themselves, what to look out for, and being there for people.”

The couple established Spike Aware and successfully pushed for a change in the law south of the border, where a specific spiking offence was added to the statute books earlier this year,. They now want to see the same in Scotland.

They also do a lot of work in universities during periods such as freshers week, raising awareness of the risks of spiking and distributing simple devices to help people keep themselves safe.

Now they’ve received fresh support for their campaign, and it has come from an unlikely source – a group of local teenagers, whose school has been taking part in the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative (YPI).

Supported by the Wood Foundation, the programme involves young people researching local charities before selecting one on which they will focus. The group then gathers as much information as possible, turning this into a funding pitch in the hopes of securing a £3,000 donation to their chosen organisation.

Introduced in 2008, YPI has become one of the most widespread initiatives in Scottish schools, with hundreds of thousands of pupils taking part and nearly £10m distributed to date.

Spike Aware has been the chosen charity for a number of groups over the years, including some from Biggar High School, where Greg was a pupil. Recently, however, the group advocating for them won their school’s event, meaning that Spike Aware benefitted from an unexpected funding boost.

The cash they received was spent on a range of different safety materials that can be handed out to young people at university and community events. In this way, the young people who worked so hard to research the charity and develop their presentations, while gaining skills themselves, have also contributed directly to helping others.

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A wide range of charities have benefitted from YPI funding since the programme’s inception. Pupils often select local organisations with which they have a personal connection, such as Soma’s Light in Orkney, Ettrickbridge and Drydren Riding for the Disabled, Glasgow South West Food Bank, Conscious Edinburgh, and more.

The programme has been adopted hundreds of schools across Scotland, and data from the Wood Foundation shows that the most common social issues addressed by YPI charities in the past year are mental health and wellbeing, physical health, domestic abuse, and poverty.

Winning charities have typically used the new funds to bolster existing services, but around a third have even been able to expand their offerings and help more people.

The benefits to successful organisations are clear, but Colin says he loves taking part in YPI even when they don’t win, not just because it still helps to spread the charity’s message, but also because of the way in which it seems to help the pupils who get involved.

YPI is ultimately a type of student-led, interdisciplinary learning in which young people bring together their knowledge and skills from different areas in order to address a real-world issue. It is a form of education that is sometimes dismissed as lacking in rigour, or which really just gives pupils license to mess around.

Colin does not agree: “I thought it was really fantastic and in my own way I actually saw them growing into it because they had a basic knowledge when you first started talking to them, and then they would learn more, they would learn things that they obviously didn't know about how to protect themselves.

“I would give them a few ideas how to introduce things, but it's good that they come up with it all themselves. We had one group in the past who asked: 'Can you give us a bundle of leaflets, because all the parents are coming and we're going to put leaflets in every chair?'”

In his experience, the collaborative nature of the programme has been the most valuable.

“They're working as a team, they're learning about a whole new subject, about presentation, about working together and working with adults.”

And Colin has also spoken to parents who have seen the benefit of YPI, including one father whose son was part of a presentation about Spike Aware.

“He was so delighted because he had learned so much, and his son had put so much into it. He said: ‘I’ve seen him grow up through this project.’”

What’s more, he sees the young people taking part in YPI projects as the “volunteers of the future”, and believes that their contributions can continue long after their time at school ends.

“We’ve already got a couple of youngsters saying: ‘When we go to university we’re going to carry this on.’” They want to carry it on, and it becomes part of their life from something they did when they were 13 or 14 years old.”

More information about the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative is available online.