Oats and beans and barley grow

The Oats and Beans and Barley Grow project came about as the young people wanted to create more structure to the group and have the opportunity to increase their employability or access to education by achieving some validation of their work. They wanted to achieve this in three main ways by gaining certification, by creating an individual portfolio and by learning new skills.
The members wanted to have an opportunity to do something that they had previous never had access to and that was to travel and visit new places this they felt would help in them making new friends and experiencing new cultures and lifestyles. After researching on the web we came across the Erasmus + programme and read that this could give us the chance to travel to mainland Europe as part of a bigger project. The young people started to talk about ideas and what theme they wanted the project to have and they finally decided that they felt the Environment and Sustainability was a subject they knew little about and wanted to understand further about in relation to themselves and others.
The project will be split into three main areas there will be a self development section where the young people will be prepared and focus on gaining the required skills necessary to take part e.g linguistic skills, and basic horse riding. They will also decide on an individual project, group project, and create with a worker an individual learning plan this will set out their objectives and aims throughout the project time and into the future. The second will be the mobility of young people this will give them the opportunity to take part in Youth exchanges to a number of countries in the EU where they will be both challenged and given the opportunity to learn new skills. The third and final area is the mobility of youth workers giving them the opportunity to train further and network with other environmental youth provisions important for the future of the i-XL.
i-XL will use different types of informal learning activities this will range from informal information gathering sessions, through to a detailed outdoor activity programme that will enable the young people to experience nature and the environment like never before. Part of this learning will be achieved by the young people being involved from the very beginning of the project through to the final evaluation stage.
By the end of the programme we envisage that the results will include the young people having raised their self esteem, self confidence, they will have learnt new skills, developed a portfolio of work, had their work validated through the Youth Pass scheme, made many new friends from different cultures and backgrounds, been challenged both as an individual and as a member of a group, visited new places, done things they never thought they would have the opportunity to and importantly increased their future employability. For the workers we envisage that they will have gained further experience in putting together a programme of learning, learn new informal educational techniques, made new links and networks in the EU and finally that all participants will have enjoyed and learnt from working together throughout the programme and looking to the future