The Cross Project

CROSS’s Pastoral Programme seeks to help young people to develop holistically, overcome the challenges they are facing and grow in their self-esteem. There are three key strands to this work – lunch and after-school clubs, group mentoring and exam stress sessions.

CROSS clubs run on a weekly basis in term time across 7 secondary schools CROSS work in and are attended voluntarily by young people. Whilst the majority of students attending are from Years 7 and 8, clubs attract young people from all year groups with older students developing into a young leader role. 

Each club session involves a wide range of fun individual and team game. There is also a short discussion each week on a topic relevant to the young people, supported by an activity or movie clip to help the students engage with the topic. Feedback shows that through CROSS clubs, young people develop their social skills, build friendships and grow in confidence. CROSS clubs also help enhance cross-year group relationships and therefore school cohesion.

CROSS mentoring groups run for 6 to 8 weeks, helping students identified by school pastoral teams as needing additional support to overcome the challenges they are facing, with sessions using a range of games, activities, media clips, discussion and reflection to achieve this. Each course has a specific focus helping equip young people to understand the challenges they are facing as well as provide them with tools to help manage these difficulties.

CROSS run mentoring courses on a wide range of topics, including friendship, resilience, anger management, transitioning to secondary school, bereavement, boys groups, girls groups, stress and anxiety, and self-esteem. Mentoring groups generally consist of between 6 and 8 students per course.

CROSS offer exam stress sessions to GCSE students who are particularly vulnerable to stress and anxiety. These one-off, hour-long lessons use a range of games, media clips, discussion and reflection to equip young people with strategies to manage stress. Feedback has shown that the overwhelming majority of young people attending these sessions feel better equipped to deal with exam stress after these sessions.

For more info please see: 
www.crossproject.co.uk