Empowered Children

We love to give our children every opportunity to acquire the skills and knowledge they need to create a more compassionate, equitable and sustainable world where they personally and collectively thrive. We encourage our children to have self agency, strong oracy skills and the courage to participate and lead.

Teaching in all of our schools is rich in oracy development. St Helens Primary and The Oaks Primary lead our Oracy professional development and practice as Voice 21 Centres of Excellence. This approach gives our children the right support to articulate their thoughts and build on the ideas of others so that they can hold their own, be heard, and shape the conversations that they want to be part of.

Youth Leadership and Social Action is strong in every one of our schools, with regular fundraising and volunteer activities as well as eco-councils, road safety teams, school councils, Circle Groups and many more. Many of our schools are also UN Rights Respecting Schools.

Two children from every school have the opportunity to join the ASSET Arrows, our Trust-wide Pupil Parliament. The Arrows act as "MPPs" meeting together each half term and going back to their school "constituencies" to consult and bring about change on the things that matter in our school communities. In 2024-25 their big challenge has been to lead the transformation of school dinners for our trust wide "Food Project".

When children leave ASSET schools they have the opportunity to join the ASSET Alumni. This is a youth social action group of ASSET school leavers who lead activity to address challenges faced by children in Suffolk. In 2025 the Alumni group created and delivered the Suffolk Young Speaker of the Year Awards as they are passionate about young people's voices being heard.

ASSET is a partner in the Ipswich Social Mobility Alliance, and we work closely with our ISMA partners and #iwill to amplify the Power of Youth. Our children played an important role in speaking up about children's issues as part of the National Youth Strategy consultation at the Ipswich Hack in May 2025. In June 2025 we won the Civic Partnership Award for our work partnering with other local organisations to lift children's voices and make space for them to lead place-based work.