Outside Chance relaunched its anti crime project in Greater London secondary schools for its fourth full year in October 2007.  'You Don't Know Who You're Dealing With!' is a high impact, visual, early intervention programme which takes secondary school pupils and young people from Greater London through a journey from peer pressure, bullying, antisocial behaviour and petty crime into actual conditions, clothing and the often harsh regime of a young offender unit.  The impact of crime, a criminal record and a prison sentence on a young person's life are all covered in some detail.  The programme moves on to a visual presentation of a number of crime scenes, all of them involving young people. This sector of our programme is only shown after at least two members of staff have viewed the content in advance of the workshop and given their approval.

Launched in September 2004 with an original three-year projection of 7,000 attendees, we almost breached this forecast in our first year, having presented to 6,506 pupils and young people in just 9 months.  In our second year, we delivered our programme to 19,100+ students and young people in a self imposed and somewhat punishing schedule which we shall not repeat.  We closed Year 3 of this project on Friday, July 13, 2007 at Ravens Wood School in Bromley, Kent with, ironically, our largest single audience to date - 450 young people, bringing our three year total attendees to 39,650.  On July 18, 2008, we delivered our final workshop of the 2007-2008 school year at Harris Academy Merton to 560 students, producing a four year total of 53,384. 

 

In September 2007, we applied fees for our workshops on the basis of £195 in venues west of a north/south line from Enfield to Croydon and £245 in venues east of a north/south line from Enfield to Croydon.  The additional costs reflected the extra staff and travel costs involved in reaching East London destinations.  Again, we noticed a marked reduction in bookings in the quarter period September 2007 to December 2007 which, historically, we can safely attribute to the imposition of fees.  We were able to draw on our somewhat limited 'unrestricted reserves' this year in order to support our schools' programme but this option will NOT be available in the 2008-2009 school year or beyond.  We shall be compelled to deliver workshop numbers, purely on the basis of our success in fundraising.

 

In our first of our three annual mailouts to London schools in September 2008, we shall be offering early booking discounts to schools who book us for June or July 2009 in the run up to the summer break.   This is, historically, a very busy period for us as schools prefer to book us just before the long summer break when, in some cases, students may be most vulnerable to peer pressure and engage in petty offending.  However, we have also had to reject a number of last minute bookings from schools due to the lack of availability of presentation slots.  We are trialing the early booking discount in order to, hopefully, alleviate this 'log jam'.

 

A copy of our Schools' Report 2007-2008 will be available in 'Downloads' section of this website in late August 2008.