Successful launch for peer education in schools

07June 2007

St Christopher's homeless intervention project moved off the drawing board and into the community this week with the successful launch of our peer education campaign, using service users and former service users to inform young people about the realities of homelessness.

The first peer education session took place at Eltham Hill School in Greenwich with a year 8 class.

Our first peer educators, Samantha Ketibuah and Keisha McEwen, had completed their training and, when it was time to put all the theory into practice, they rose to the occasion.

The session went really well, with excellent feedback from the class, who were asked to fill in an evaluation form afterwards.

88% said that the presentation made them think about homelessness in a different way, the same proportion of children said that it had given them new information that they had not known before, and that it had helped them to think about their future. 88% also said that they now knew where to go if they had a housing problem.

The highest score of all was a massive vote of confidence in our peer educators Samantha and Keisha: a stunning 92% of children at the school said that the person giving the presentation knew what they were talking about.

The South East London Housing Partnership has produced a very useful booklet on leaving home and homelessness, which we are using in our peer education sessions. To download a copy, click Leaving home.