It’s the core purpose of our business: to help put people on the path to a better everyday life. One of the ways we do this is through our education programme.

Here’s how we make a positive difference through our support for education.

Who we work with

We support children, young people and adults from disadvantaged areas in their learning as well as providing them with insights into the world of work. In this way, we’re helping to raise aspirations and give them a future in which they’re included in society.

As well as supporting our key education partners, we also work with other partner providers to offer volunteering opportunities to colleagues. These help them to develop their own skills and help us develop a diverse future talent pool for our business.

National Literacy Trust

We support a range of projects that build young people’s aspirations and help them to develop their communication and literacy skills.

As a result, they’re better equipped to succeed in school, at university or in the workplace.

Click here to visit the National Literacy Trust’s website and learn more.

National Numeracy

We’ve been proud to support National Numeracy Day for the past four years which helps to raise awareness of the issues around poor numeracy in the UK. The campaign helps people to get started on their journey towards improving their skills and confidence with numbers.

We also support National Numeracy’s ‘community leader’ training programme. Through this, dedicated people across the country are given the tools and knowledge they need to raise awareness in their own communities around the importance of having good numeracy skills.

Social Impact Programme Manager Cathy Prior said, “We’ve supported and donated to National Numeracy for a while now and their a perfect partner for us. As a finance company, numbers are something we deal with every day and so do our customers, who often struggle with maths while working out their finances. Brushing up on numbers can also help us be more confident at work and progress in our jobs. The online learning tool is easy to use and can be done in your own time at your own pace.”

Click here to visit their website.

Learn more about our work with them and how we're supporting National Numeracy in 2022 here.

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Leading Children

We’re delighted to partner with this Bradford-based education consultancy, which has developed a bespoke literacy and numeracy programme for schools close to where our head office is based. The programme provides training to teachers in local schools, and improves the quality of teaching so that they can support primary school children who are slower graspers to develop their literacy and numeracy skills, and catch up with their peers.

Click to learn more.

School-Home Support

There are many barriers that can prevent a child from even getting to school in the morning. It could be their own personal struggles, or perhaps financial or psychological challenges that their parent or guardian may have. We’re incredibly proud to work with School-Home Support to fund school practitioners and place them into local schools where children and their families need the most support.

Since School-Home Support’s foundation in 1984, the charity has been using early intervention to break the intergenerational cycles of deprivation. It is the only charity in England working with children and their families using a holistic family-based approach. SHS’s work looks beyond the classroom to tackle whole-family issues such as parenting, poverty, and mental ill health, using bespoke support strategies to help children achieve their potential.

Over 1 million people have been plunged into poverty recently and this has been a key factor in the increase in need for SHS’s services. SHS changes the life chances of young people, and we help them to do that.

We fund practitioners in four schools across Bradford and Medway where SHS practitioners work continuously to tackle barriers to education, and we know this works. Both the schools and the families they support appreciate the amazing difference SHS practitioners make. Between January 2021 to December 2021, our funding has helped SHS practitioners to:

support 284 individuals;
work with 125 individuals via intensive support;
make 9,758 interventions of intensive support;
work with 159 individuals that benefited from early response support;
make 827 interventions of early response support; and
achieve an average attendance increase of 10.9%.

I just want to say a huge thank you to Vanquis Banking Group for the amazing contribution it makes to School-Home Support. 2021 was a challenging year for so many of the families we work with, but your continued commitment has helped us to give every child the chance to thrive and achieve despite immense challenges caused by the pandemic. Through this contribution, SHS has been able to help to support children and families to maximise educational opportunities and improve their life chances.
Jaine Stannard, CEO, School-Home Support

Outward Bound Trust

An educational charity dedicated to unlocking the potential of young people from deprived backgrounds through learning and adventure in the wilderness. Through this trust and their courses, young people develop essential skills such as self-confidence, resilience, and the determination to succeed.

When they were struggling because of Covid-19, Vanquis Banking Group promised to help. Ordinarily, our annual funding would be allocated to provide adventures for young people from our chosen schools; however, we enabled OBT to use our funding to adapt its programmes amidst the constraints of Covid-19 regulations, to help young people from across the UK experience an adventure.

Having more flexible funding meant OBT was able to create Adventure Days, which could be run from its centres and attended by young people who lived nearby. In addition, it also created an an innovative in-school adventure programme– if young people could not go to OBT then OBT would go to them. It sent its instructors to school playgrounds, playing fields and local green spaces to help young people reconnect
with each other, and the great outdoors.

The pandemic has had a significant impact upon young people – affecting their self-confidence, resilience, and ambitions for the future. A powerful experience in the outdoors can help young people better deal with the isolation, fear and disruption they’ve experienced, teaching them important lessons about their own tenacity, and the importance of making meaningful connections with others. We cannot thank Vanquis Banking Group enough for its continued generosity, enabling young people to experience a life-changing opportunity in the wilderness.

Lucy Sharma, Corporate Partnerships Lead,OBT

Ahead Partnership

Ahead Partnership helps businesses of all sizes and sectors to deliver social value projects. These overcome inequality, promote opportunity and deliver positive change within society.

With the help of business volunteers like ours, they help young people build employability skills through activities such as careers panels, mock interview sessions and ‘employ me’ boot camps.

How we helped children and young people during pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had a big impact on the lives of children and young people across the UK. We were keen to do our bit to support our education partners however we could.

We worked with them to identify their issues and concerns and then adapted the programmes we fund where necessary. They faced many, varying challenges. Some partners were able to bring their programmes online while others like Outward Bound were unable to provide residential breaks. Instead, they took their programme to local schools.

Our committed team of volunteers: In 2021, Vanquis Banking Group colleagues volunteered 425 hours.

Their support has helped children and young people to develop their literacy skills and prepare them for the world of work.

Here’s a taster of what our volunteers have been up to:

Careers panels: Colleagues shared their career journeys, the roles they do and what it’s like to work for an organisation like ours.
Mock interview sessions: Our volunteers helped students practice speaking about themselves and their strengths before they leave school and move to a real-life work situation.
Work insight days: Students learned about delivering excellent customer service, renting and buying commercial property and even pitched ideas to our Digital Dragons’ Den.
Reading Partners: Colleague volunteers helped younger children to practice reading to improve their literacy skills, develop a love of stories and feel confident about their own ability.

HR Business Partner Gill Pinder and Solutions Architect Rita Patel both took part in mock interview sessions.

“I found it rewarding to be able to support and give something back to the local community, as well as making a difference to a young person’s life to help prepare for when they leave school.”

Gill Pinder

“It was great to speak to the young people to understand the challenges they are facing as well as the impact Covid has had on their wellbeing and education itself. It was good to help them build confidence for when they go for real interviews and to enable them to make clearer career choices for the future.”

Rita Patel

You can read more about our volunteers here

Do you want to improve your own skills?

Are you just starting out on your career path? A parent trying to help your children with their school work? Or maybe you’re looking to improve your own skills?

We have lots of different resources available that will help you on your journey.