Peckham students get confidence boosted at trapeze school in Ruskin Park

By Connor McLaughlin

Trapezing into their newfound confidence, a local school has found a way to boost their student’s morale and get them out and about.

Newlands Academy, based in Stuart Road, Peckham, partnered with TLCC Trapeze School earlier this month to offer their students a new enrichment activity for the summer.

The school specialises in helping boys with social, emotional, and mental health needs and part of their course was the inclusion of enrichment activities to help them better manage themselves.

Due to the pandemic most of their programmes were stopped leaving the boys without these needed activities.

TLCC operates from Ruskin Park Camberwell in the summer and the boys have been attending classes learning how to jump from the top board, hang upside down and jump into backflips.

Students Jay Hubbard, 15, and Nathan Kelly, 14, have been taking part in the trapezing activities for the last three weeks and said the programme has been great and that they feel more confident as a result.

Hubbard said: “Honestly, it helped a lot. I feel like I can do a lot more things.

“The best part was honestly the first one. It really feels like you’re like swinging around and then all the moves you do makes you really think that you’re flying.”

Kelly continued: “It’s been really fun just swinging in the air and just facing your fears of heights and stuff.”

The pair also explained that school is now becoming more fun to be in again, after the pandemic had put a hold on their other enrichment activities.

Hubbard said: “I always liked going to school but now I’m pretty excited to go to school.”

Kelly added: “If we could have it [trapezing line] in the school playground that would be fantastic.”

Teaching partner, Emma Rochford, 35, said that the programme had encouraged some of the boys with negative views of school to come in again.

She said: “Some of the students that have gone and been school refusers before in the past, so it’s been like an ideal way to get them into the school to get them out onto a school trip, which has been great to build up relationships with each other.”

Miss Rochford said that she had seen a massive development in all the boys since starting the programme.

She said: “There’s definitely been a shift. One of the boys that came was new and he had trouble building up relationships with his peers and now he comes along, and even though he might not swing every time he’s there with us.

“The social time with his peers, away from the school environment is really beneficial.”

She also said that their listening skills had improved and they now had the ability to follow instructions better after learning how to safely trapeze.

She said: “They know that they have to do this, whatever action has been asked of them when they’re told otherwise, they won’t be able to actually do the move that they want to do.”

The idea for the programme came about after Miss Rochford had come across the trapeze school one day on her walk home and approached them about offering a programme for her students.

She said: “I emailed them to see if they have ever worked with a school and I explained our boy’s situation and they said that they’d be willing to work with us.

“I then emailed about funding, and they recommended that I speak to friends of Ruskin Park for the funding if we were having issues and then it kind of went from there.”

After approaching Friends Of Ruskin Park, funding was secured from an external beneficiary which meant that the students could access trapeze free of charge.

Thanks to the trapeze programme, the boys now look forward to their Wednesdays with Miss Rochford joking that even the boys who don’t come regularly make sure they are there for trapeze.

The last skill the boys will be learning next week will be ‘the catch’, where one trapeze artist catches the other, and Jay and Nathan said they feel it would go well.