PORTSMOUTH FC OPEN STATE OF THE ART CHILDREN’S STUDY CENTRE

Alexandre Gaydamak, the owner of Portsmouth Football Club, has officially opened the club’s new state of the art, 400 square metre children's Study Centre.

[UKPRwire, Mon Sep 15 2008] Alexandre Gaydamak, the owner of Portsmouth Football Club, has officially opened the club’s new state of the art, 400 square metre Study Centre.

The Pompey Study Centre, which the club runs in association with Portsmouth City Council, provides runs a football-inspired literacy, numeracy, healthy eating and IT programme in-house four days a week for hundreds of local primary and secondary school pupils, who are not engaged in a conventional classroom setting. This Centre uses football, and more specifically Pompey, as a motivational and learning tool children who are not best engaged in a conventional classroom setting. It has now been running successfully for seven years and the new Centre marks the next stage in its development.

The children attend ten two hour sessions, twice weekly for a period of five weeks. A variety of activities are delivered every session. These include opportunities to improve creative writing skills, reading, speaking and listening, key skills in numeracy and ICT as well as games and team building activities. There is plenty of learning support with mentors, predominately from the University of Portsmouth, working along side the pupils.
The mentors support, encourage and motivate the youngsters.

Pupils also get lots of opportunities to visit Fratton Park; they edit their own short film of their experience using the Study Centre's suite of Apple Macs. Other opportunities may include interviewing a Pompey player or attending a Premiership match. The pupils are rewarded with incentives at the end of each session, to encourage continued achievement. The grand finale of the experience is a Celebration Event at Fratton Park where pupils are
again rewarded for their hard work. A visitor, often the Pompey Mascot, Frogmore, or a Pompey player, present prizes and certificates to all the pupils and families, teachers and friends are also invited to attend.

On the IT side, for example, the pupils use the Mac computers and the software programme iComic to create a comic strip about their own involvement with the club, mixing photographs of themselves with photographs from the club to produce and star in their own comic strip. In addition, they use the Macs to produce posters and other
materials about their time at the club. A number of the players are also regular visitors.

The Study Centre forms part of the club’s Respect Pompey agenda which, in conjunction with Portsmouth City Council, promotes positive behaviour in health, education, personal well-being, citizenship, relationships and environment.

Speaking at the opening, Peter Storrie, Chief Executive of Portsmouth FC, said:

“This has been a big scheme and something we have been working on for a while. As a club, we take our responsibilities to the community very seriously and we look forward, not only to seeing between 300 and 500 local children in here every week, but also our apprentices continuing their education in here too.”

Clare Martin, the Study Centre Manager, says:

“The club has taken on the lease of the new Study Centre for us and covers all sorts of other "in kind" costs including sandwiches every evening for study support groups, complementary tickets, use of suites for presentations and celebration evenings, access to the stadium at all times for tours and first hand experiences on which to base pupils work, prizes for celebration evenings, access to players. There are now 164 "Playing for Success" Study Centres nationally and I don’t know of any that support their study centre any where near the way Pompey does.”

Ends.