Two students of the academy, Miski Abdirahman and Umayyah Ahmed have attended an awards ceremony at the QEII Centre in Westminster, London, to celebrate completing the 2018 AQA Unlocking Potential programme.

Over the last eight months, the students enrolled on theprogramme have been working with amazing athlete mentors from the Dame Kelly Holmes trust to help unlock hidden attributes and skills. The programme aims to raise young people’s aspirations and expectations on future life goals, whether from school to Further Education, Further Education to Higher Education, or into training and employment.

As part of the programme all the students had to deliver a social action project to help people in their community. These included raising awareness of mental health issues, helping the homeless and collecting for food banks, fundraising events for various good causes and lots of sporting events to get more young people active and engaged in sport. Miski and Umayyah have been working alongside local charity UC3, planning and promoting their social action project, which has given them a chance to make a difference in their community as well developing important life skills such as organisation and self-awareness.

Their mentor Jenny Wallwork, former world number five badminton player and Commonwealth Games medal winner, described them as a pleasure to work with.