Recently I’ve been working on the new girls’ strategic outreach project. This project aims to address the low confidence, self-belief, and personal expectations of girls when it comes to higher education. This project began due to girls scoring lower in the Hello Future ‘My Future Self’ survey for personal expectations and self-belief. Therefore, we are creating a programme of interventions designed to support the raising of girl’s confidence, self-belief and personal expectations. This includes providing content to support girls in striving for goals and not just doing what they feel is expected of them.
So far, I have been working on doing research which forms the foundation of this project. For example, one of the key findings has been that gender stereotypes are still prominent and impact girls at school. These stereotypes impact girl’s aspirations in terms of what careers they aspire to do. For example, gender stereotypes are prominent in terms of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects, meaning that often girls did not have role models in these subjects which hindered their aspirations. We also found that girls place more pressure on themselves when it comes to things like revising for exams compared to boys, this impacting their confidence and self-belief.
From my own experience at school, I can appreciate what we found in the research. I remember often feeling that I was lacking in confidence. Specifically, I felt I lacked confidence in STEM subjects and didn’t believe I could achieve high grades, particularly in maths. This is why this project is important. The interventions that we create will work to increase girls’ confidence and self-belief and support their aspirations in striving for their goals and not just what they feel is expected of them.
I have really enjoyed working on this project and doing lots of research and brainstorming ideas about possible interventions. One of the challenges of this project has been creating it from scratch. We haven’t run this project before so having to think of new interventions tailored to the needs of girls has sometimes been tricky. However, I have really enjoyed getting involved with the project and the findings of the research have been very interesting.
We are hoping to launch the programme in March around the time of International Womens Day. Until then I will be continuing to help develop the project by creating new interventions and ways of supporting girls to increase their confidence and self-belief. I am excited to see this project develop and can’t wait until it’s ready to be launched.
If you have any questions about the project or about Hello Future in general, email us at: hellofuture@cumbria.ac.uk.