Bursting onto TikTok
Our SW!TCH team have recently started posting on TikTok, rapidly growing their following of young people to over 300 in a few months. As well as promoting upcoming activities, the team are able to provide a wider range of content for young people than in their face-to-face mentoring sessions—for example, key youth workers introduce themselves and share their experiences with the young people, and each week, various members of the team come together to share motivational messages.
We started using TikTok four months ago as we thought it was a good way to reach more young people—we wanted to share our mentoring content with a broader community.
We were hoping it would give us a way to reach young people that are a bit different from the ones that already come to our activities—those less likely to be out and meet one of our team in person. We want to give them an idea of what we offer and get them interested.
The overall response has really exceeded our expectations. But it’s something where you really need to know your audience—we know a lot of young people are already on TikTok, so it made sense to give it a try. And any support and engagement you can offer like that is always helpful.
—Ruth Lowe, Head of Young People’s Services
"As school pupil rolls grow in Scotland, is bigger better?"
On Sunday 20th August, LifeLine’s CEO Nathan was featured in the Sunday Post as part of an article looking at concerns of growing class sizes in Scotland. Drawing on LifeLine’s experience of delivering SW!TCH mentoring in schools across East London, he spoke of the difficulties of oversized classes, the need for community within schools, and the benefits that mentoring can bring to pupils.
[…] when schools are overcrowded, both staff and pupils are put under pressure. Some of the schools we mentor in are overcrowded and we struggle to find a place to mentor.
