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How toddlers are savingtroubledteenagers
 Adolescents at risk of school exclusion are being asked to mentor young children – with surprising results.Children: Our Ultimate Investment is oneof the 10 charity projectsbeing supported by the Guardian this Christmas
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Susanna Rustin
guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 December 2010 09.36 EST Article history Asession at Duncombe primary school, north London, run by the charity COUI UK.Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian
"School gets boring, you do the same thing every day more or less,"Omar says. We are sitting on toddler-size chairs in the nursery of a northLondon primary school where this 13-year-old is a participant in a projectthat takes vulnerable teenagers out of the routine of secondary schooland turns them into mentors for childrenunder five.For the past six weeks Omar, a year-nine pupil who is missingtechnology, maths and geography lessons for this session, has beenpaired with Raoul, a lively three-year-old who seems to have troublekeeping still."Small things, like if he's stepped on someone's foot, he shouts at theteacher about it," Omar says. "He's really energetic, he has a smaller range of grammar than most kids and he gets frustrated."But Omar believes that the extra attention Raoul has received hashelped him settle down. "If I was on top of him all the time he wouldn't likeit," he says, "but he's become quieter. The best way to create arelationship is to play with him." Another teenager, Yvonne, who keeps her hat on indoors, is sitting at atable with two little girls turning cotton wool balls into snowmen aided bylashings of glue. Yvonne's reserved manner slips away as she movesaround the room joining in with the other children."She's shy but talks a lot when she wants to, about different stuff,"Yvonne says of her regular toddler, Lucy, nodding happily when I ask if she's ood at this work. "I like bein here because it's eaceful."
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Yvonne, also 13, has three younger brothers and says she was picked tocome here by her headteacher "because I'm caring, I look after people".Omar is one of nine siblings, and had only just started school. Previouslyhe was home-educated and had no friends. He finds the degree of emotional openness expected here hard work. "They look at you in weirdways when you say something about yourself," he says. Aalim, another participant, answers my first question with a joke. "He'sshort, obviously," he grins, when asked what his toddler, Hamzah, lookslike.Daniel has only just joined this group and is more withdrawn, unwilling tobe left unsupervised and looking often to the facilitator, Gary, for reassurance.It's not immediately clear why any of these teenagers are here, why theymay have been judged more at risk than their peers of becoming one of the number "not in education, employment or training", so-called Neets,and therefore in need of the extra help and encouragement the charityaims to provide.The answer is that away from the warm, unthreatening atmosphere of theprimary school, some of these teenagers continually get into fights. Allare from low-income families, and Daniel and Omar have experiencedviolence in the home.Gordon Phillips, the social inclusion manager at Queen's Park communityschool, which has been sending 13- and 14-year-olds to Teens andToddlers for years, says that with aggressive students the hope is thatthe project will "soften them up". Teenagers prone to violentconfrontations with peers are rarely aggressive with younger children, hesays, and learning to handle out-of-control toddlers can help them thinkabout how to manage themselves.The idea of pairing teenagers with toddlers comes from the US, whereLaura Huxley, self-help author and widow of the writer Aldous Huxley,spent her later years putting her ideas about "human potential" andpregnancy prevention into practice in the first "Teens and Toddlers"projects.Nine years ago the American psychotherapist Diana Whitmore decided totry a similar thing in the UK. Her group,called Children: Our UltimateInvestment, operates in Blackpool, Lincolnshire, London, Manchester and Northumberland. The charity has so far reached 3,500youngpeople, many of whom come from severely deprived homes. It plans todouble in size, though cuts in local authority funding now mean privatedonations are needed.Identifying young people at risk of becoming teenage parents is one of the selection criteria, but this is part of a broader aim of helpingyoungsters avoid dropping out. The point is to give teenagers a realisticidea of how demanding a young child can be, and to boost their self-esteem by placing them in a setting where they must behave responsibly.Often a teenager is twinned with a toddler with a similar personality:Mariam, a 20-year-old university student and one of the charity's greatsuccesses, says helping her toddler calm down helped her calm down."All my life I got in trouble for talking too much, not being quiet when I wasmeant to. Energy and power can work for you or against you," she says.Full of ambition for her studies, her partner, a mortgage and a big familysometime in the future, she seems overwhelmed by the opportunities thatcould so easily have escaped her. When she joined Teens and ToddlersMariam was on the brink of school exclusion. "I'm all about revolution andchange," she says now, "I want to take hold of my responsibilities insociety."It's not hard to picture her succeeding. Teenagers, in her phrase, are"the babies of the adult world", and almost all those who complete Teensand Toddlers do leave with a qualification.But change is not always this dramatic. It is through the relationsbetween children of different ages that this unusual charity achieves itsmore subtle effects.In the motivational, pep-talky session with biscuits and crisps that followsthe nursery work, the teens are asked to say what children need."Education", "love", "understandable people" are the answers. Then they
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