Document Category: Education/Training

Spark iT was founded in 2021, as the UK emerged from Covid, to tackle digital exclusion at its roots. Today, partnering with community spaces to run
Digital Cafés across Somerset each month, more than 30 cafés open their doors. Each with trained and friendly volunteer Digital Champions on hand, ready to help.
They’re free, welcoming to everyone, and support people to use the internet safely and access online services that support their health, wellbeing and daily lives.

The Somerset VRP Annual Report outlines multi‑agency work to prevent and reduce serious violence through early intervention, data‑led action and community partnership. Key activity includes governance for serious youth violence, Safer Somerset Priorities tactical meetings, police Early Intervention Team work, behaviour‑change education for pupils, town‑centre youth safety programmes, online harm reduction, and commissioning of high‑impact interventions such as A&E navigators, sports mentors and school‑based “teachable moments”. The VRP prioritises knife crime, street‑based violence and sexual violence for 2025–26, with a strong focus on safeguarding, prevention and community safety.

Somerset’s refreshed Joint Forward Plan sets out how the Integrated Care System will deliver the county’s Health and Care Strategy from 2024–2029. It focuses on five priorities: restoring financial sustainability, developing the workforce, improving system flow, strengthening integrated neighbourhood teams, and transforming population health. The plan responds to significant financial pressures, growing demand and inequalities, and places strong emphasis on prevention, partnership with the VCFSE, data-driven decision making and supporting people to live healthier, independent lives.

The 2024–25 Annual Report outlines progress against the Police and Crime Plan’s five priorities: strengthening neighbourhood policing; reducing violent crime (including male violence against women and girls and serious youth violence); preventing crime through partnerships; supporting victims; and improving policing standards. Key achievements include 10,000+ hotspot foot patrol hours, expanded violence‑reduction programmes, improvements in victim services, and enhanced scrutiny, training and community engagement. The report highlights collaboration with local authorities, VCFSE organisations, and national partners to build safer, more confident communities.

The Somerset Council Plan 2023–2027 sets out the vision for building a fairer, greener, healthier and more resilient Somerset. It focuses on four priority areas: tackling the climate and ecological emergencies; improving health and wellbeing; reducing inequalities; and strengthening Somerset’s economy and communities. The plan emphasises prevention, community involvement, partnership working, improving access to services, supporting education and skills, enabling sustainable growth, protecting vulnerable residents, and promoting cultural, economic and environmental resilience. It also highlights the role of Local Community Networks, sustainable transport, green technologies, inclusive services, decent housing, and supporting local jobs and opportunities.

The toolkit is intended for use with Key Stage 2 aged children, in order to support them to conduct a research and action project in their school to make changes on things within their school or local community which matter to them.

This workbook is for anyone interested in community based research. It is for someone new to research as well as someone who has more experience. Each page takes you through a step in the research cycle. So, it starts with what your community needs and ends with how community members can get the best of out of the research project.

The Labour Party National Youth Strategy, which outlines the actions the government are committing to over the next 10 years to secrure the future that young people have told them that they want

The Power Threat Meaning Framework is an over-arching structure for identifying patterns in emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubling behaviour, as an alternative to psychiatric diagnosis and classification. The project team’s aim was to produce a foundational document which sets out the philosophical, theoretical and empirical basis for such a framework and describes how it can serve as a conceptual alternative to psychiatric classification in relation to emotional distress and troubled or troubling behaviour.

This is an overview. A full 400+ page report is available from the British Psychological Society.

We received a multi-year grant from the Garfield Weston Foundation in 2021 to support the work our charity delivers in communities with young people and for families. This second report highlights the impact this grant has made during 2022/23, the second period and details regarding our participants, the outcomes of our work, case studies and what we are proud of achieving during this period.

This review outlines our wide range of services and projects delivered in 2022. It explains our impact as we fulfil our charitable objectives to be responsive to needs and improve the lives of children, young people, their families, and local communities.

Delivering inspirational mentoring to Somerset’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged young people.

The 2023/24 fiscal year was a year of transition for CCS with internal reviews, contingency planning, and development of our new Strategy, aligned to our new Vision, Mission and Values.

Infographic style report that summarises the centre’s activities and impact between April 2023 and March 2024