Poorer children are falling behind their classmates at school. It has been shown that outdoor adventure activities, like those offered by UKSA, can help young people to catch up academically because they help children to develop important life skills like team-work, communication and determination. Our residential programmes can also help children to widen their horizons and raise their aspirations. However, cost is often a barrier to the families of children that we want to help most of all. Sadly, we often hear that not all the children in a class or group have been able to come to UKSA when their peers visit us.

Our mission at UKSA is to widen access to maritime training programmes. Up to 10,000 people train with us each year, thousands of whom are school children staying for up to a week. Thanks to our donors and partners up to a third of our students receive free or subsidised training each year. However, we know there is much more to be done to support more of the young people who need it most.

We launched the Leave No Child Behind campaign in 2019 because, of the 6,000 children from 119 schools due to visit UKSA this year, we estimated that 480 children would have been left behind when their peers were here unless financial assistance could be sought. We anticipate a similar picture in 2020. This number is not acceptable.

We are aiming to raise £50,000 through the Leave No Child Behind campaign to enable up to 260 disadvantaged children from across the UK to participate in full-board residential on-water activity programmes at UKSA alongside their classmates. Each 3, 4 or 5-day programme enables every child to participate in a range of adventure activities, such as sailing, windsurfing, water-confidence and team-building, from morning to evening, enabling them to build life skills which are so vital to their development and which can help them to catch up with their peers.