Religion & Worldviews Home Educators’ Fund
Are you a home educating parent or guardian in the West Midlands region?
We are excited to announce the launch of a new, pilot Religion & Worldviews Home Educators’ Fund, OPEN NOW! Home educating parents and guardians across 6 West Midlands counties will be able to apply for grants of up to £1,000 for projects that allow them to explore, experiment, and adapt their religion and worldviews teaching methods.
The fund has been co-designed by home educating families and three charities, All Saints Educational Trust, Culham St Gabriel’s and St Peter’s Saltley Trust, supported by The Social Innovation Partnership.
There are two categories of grant – small grants up to £200 (apply any time until the fund runs out) and project grants of £200-1500 (deadline 17th November) .
Anyone that is actively home educating in the following areas will be able to apply for a grant: Birmingham, Solihull and Black Country, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent, Telford and Wrekin, Coventry and Warwickshire, and Worcestershire.
Full details and how to apply can be found on the Culham St Gabriel’s website, here.
Saltley Trust’s Ian Jones writes:
‘At St Peter’s Saltley Trust we have been really pleased to be involved in the creation of the pilot Religion and Worldviews Home Educators’ Fund. Many schools do fantastic work in religious education, but we also know that some children and young people thrive best in a home school education setting, and in recent years the number of children being educated at home has been increasing in most regions of the UK. It has been exciting to be part of creating something which specifically seeks to benefit these families, who are often not eligible to access other sources of funding for their children’s learning. As funders of religious education, we also recognise that a strong education in religion and worldviews has a wider societal dimension in addition to what takes place in institutional settings such as schools and colleges; home school education is an important part of that wider canvas.
One of the most exciting and attractive elements of the Religion and Worldviews Home Educators’ Fund was its highly collaborative approach: the fund’s aims and objectives, application processes and eligibility criteria have all been co-designed by home educating parents/carers (along with the three participating Trusts), meaning that the Fund could be shaped according to their aspirations and needs and the practical realities of home educating. Funders are increasingly aware of the power dynamics involved in any grant-making relationship, and we want to learn more about how we can co-create funding opportunities which give greater agency to those the fund is designed to benefit. In this fund, for example, funding decisions are taken by a community panel of home educators.
In the process of co-design, we’ve also learned a lot from the Social Innovation Partnership, who had experience of supporting the development of a range of collaboratively-designed grant programmes. We’re really looking forward to seeing what creative and innovative proposals home educators put forward in this pilot fund – but also learning from this initiative about how we might work on grant funds which are co-designed with partners in other sectors which the Trust seeks to benefit’.
