GT Scholars X Brit Insurance Digital Challenge Wins the Initiative of the Year at the National Insurance Awards 2023

by GT Scholars Our Impact

GT Scholars won the Initiative of the Year at The National Insurance Awards 2023.

The event took place in London and celebrated excellence in the insurance industry. The event focuses on highlighting the companies and teams that are eminent in their field.

The Initiative of the Year category recognises organisations and their game-changing ideas and programmes reshaping the insurance business.

GT Scholars x Brit Insurance Digital Challenge

In 2021, Brit Insurance, a leading Lloyds Insurance Syndicate specialising in commercial insurance, contacted GT Scholars. Brit Insurance wanted to partner with GT Scholars to work with a younger audience. Their main aim was to tackle the diversity challenge at its root cause.

Brit Insurance has focused on changing this area long-term through its diversity and outreach programmes and initiatives. They wanted to reach a wider audience, create a greater awareness of careers in insurance and see an overall long-term change in the insurance industry.

In May 2022, GT Scholars ran the GT Scholars x Brit Insurance Digital Challenges. The Digital Challenges help support young people’s career aspirations and create awareness of the various career opportunities available.

This unique collaboration gave young people across the UK a chance to gain work experience. The Digital Challenges helped young people build their employability skills while getting first-hand insight into insurance.

Over 795 young people from 89 schools across England participated in the challenges. These young people came from various backgrounds; for some, it was their first work experience.

Why Did We Create These Digital Challenges?

The Digital Challenges help make work experience more accessible to young people from all backgrounds.

According to a report by Education and Employers: Disconnected: Career Aspirations and Jobs in the UK, 2020, young people are not being educated about the workforce and areas of demand.

Five times as many young people want to work in culture, art, entertainment and sport as they believe more jobs are available in these fields. Over half of those young people are not interested in pursuing other careers.

This means that if young people aren’t aware of career opportunities or different types of industries, their career choices and prospects become very limited.

In addition, there are other challenges young people face. For instance, according to research, over 45% of young people aged 16-19 stated that not having access to work experience opportunities is the most significant barrier to success in their future careers.

Moreover, those from lower-income homes do not have the resources, contacts and networks to learn about work experience.

Challenges in the Insurance Industry

There are challenges in the UK’s Insurance Industry as well. Research shows that diversity is an issue in the industry in the UK.

According to the Insurance Times, Just not enough women in insurance 2018; women represent approximately 29% of employees in the insurance industry (compared to 50% in Law). The Insurance Post Insurance Census 2019 states that only 7% of employees in the insurance industry are from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds.

There are 40% more full-time male employees than full-time female employees in the financial and insurance industries in the UK (Report published by F.Norrestad, Number of full-time employees in the financial and insurance sector in the UK 2021).

The research shows that introducing diversity and inclusion initiatives won’t work independently. There needs to be a change in how talent is brought into the industry to tackle diversity. Young people from all backgrounds must be encouraged to consider a career in insurance from the earliest possible age.

How the Challenges Were Designed

The online digital challenge is an alternative to the everyday work experience. GT Scholars took many factors into account when creating the challenges. The team wanted the challenges to reach young people from diverse backgrounds without geographical barriers preventing them from joining. As well as ensuring young people, especially those from less-privileged backgrounds, avoid paying large amounts to join.

Young people could access the challenges from the comfort of their homes. They could join using their phone or laptop, irrespective of where in the UK they were from.

What the Challenges Involved

GT Scholars worked with experts from Brit Insurance and co-designed five unique challenges that explored the different roles in insurance. The challenges aimed to help young people learn about the insurance industry. They could apply what they’ve learnt to real-life scenarios through the challenges. The challenges were designed to help young people develop their research, presentation, creativity, and analytical skills.

As part of the challenge, young people learned how to solve insurance-related problems. This provided real-life scenarios that introduced them to new concepts and built their employability skills.

The young people who completed all five online challenges were given a Certificate of Completion. This could be added to their CV or Personal Statement.

Career Insight Day and Winners

Twenty-five finalists were selected and invited to a Career Insight Day, which was held at the Brit Insurance Head office in London. Finalists spent the day interacting and meeting the experts at Brit Insurance and learned about a typical day at their offices.

Each young person received a cash prize of £100 from Brit Insurance. The top three winners were chosen, winning prizes and £500 for each of their winning schools.

Dariusz Tomaszewski-Guerrero from Dartford Grammar School was one of the top three winners. He did exceptionally well in the GT Scholars x Brit Insurance Digital Challenges and was featured in the Dartford Living Magazine. You can read more about his experience here.

Temi Kamson, Founder and CEO of GT Scholars, was also at the Careers Insight Day in London. You can watch the video here to hear how she felt about the digital challenges.

How Have the Digital Challenges Helped Young People?

The Digital Challenges have positively impacted the lives of so many young people across the UK by helping them gain online work experience and build their employability skills while creating an awareness of the various careers in the insurance industry.

Feedback received from the participants after the challenges showed that young people were able to improve their research skills and felt more confident when doing a presentation. Many participants also said the challenges helped them improve their speaking and writing skills.

Moreover, impact data showed that 100% of the young people felt more confident about achieving their future aspirations and believed that what they learnt would help them achieve their aspirations.

In addition, over 90% of young people believed that the Careers Insight Day helped them improve their teamwork skills, and they would continue looking into careers in insurance beyond the challenges.

To learn more about the award-winning GT Scholars x Brit Insurance Digital Challenges and the positive difference it has made in the lives of young people, you can read the GT Scholars x Brit Insurance Impact Report.

What Did GT Scholars Achieve?

The Digital Challenges allowed GT Scholars to gain new school partnerships across the UK, expand their reach, and work with more young people. The challenges bridged the gap between young people and career opportunities, and GT Scholars increased PR and raised their and Brit Insurance’s profiles.

GT Scholars’ Future Plans for the Digital Challenges

GT Scholars aim to partner with more corporates from various industries and continue running digital challenges each year. By running digital challenges, GT Scholars hopes to:

Raise and support the aspirations of young people

Help young people connect with companies across the UK

Help young people learn about various careers, especially careers they may not have otherwise considered

Provide online work experience in multiple industries

Provide digital challenges as a way forward for improving diversity in all industries

“Our vision in the next ten years is to work with individuals and companies that are passionate about diversity and inclusion, particularly those that want to take practical steps to influence the prospects and, in the long term, permanently change the narrative for young people from less-advantaged backgrounds.” – Temi Kamson, Founder and CEO of GT Scholars.

GT Scholars is so pleased to have won the Initiative of the Year Award.

It is a prestigious achievement for GT Scholars and the Digital Challenges. Winning the Initiative of the Year Award is a giant step in improving social mobility for UK youth.

Why Partner With GT Scholars?

GT Scholars has over seven years of experience and educational expertise in helping young people. As a result, GT Scholars has helped many young scholars reach their career aspirations and prepare them for their career journey. With a network of over 450 partner schools across the UK, GT Scholars can help your company build impactful digital challenges that will reach young people far and wide.

If your corporate organisation wants to make a real difference in the lives of young people across the UK, get in touch with GT Scholars to learn more about building digital challenges. Your company can benefit from connecting with and attracting diverse new talent and making a long-term change in your industry.

An Interview With Our Founder, Temi Kamson

by GT Scholars Corporate Responsibility Our Impact Parents Volunteers What's new?

If you ever wondered about the story behind GT Scholars and how it was founded, then watch this interview with our founder, Temi Kamson.

Temi has a Masters in Civil Engineering from the University of Nottingham and a PGCE in Mathematics Education from the University of Cambridge. Having worked in state and independent schools, she set up the GT Scholars Programme with the goal of helping ambitious young people achieve their full potential, regardless of their socio-economic background. In this video, she also talks about her personal experience with the education system, why scholars enrol in our programme, what scholars will gain from the programme, and what makes our scholars successful.

If you prefer, you can read the full interview below:

Why did you start GT Scholars?

I started GT Scholars based on my own personal experience of growing up in South London. I grew up in a single-parent home, grew up in council housing and went through the state school system. I remember one of my teachers from primary school, Miss Bickersteth, telling me ‘’Temi, you can be anything you want to be.’’ That statement was so powerful that it stayed with me for the rest of my life; it is still with me today. There were so many times that I wanted to give up but I was really fortunate enough, especially towards the end of my school years to have the right opportunities come along at the right time, and that really helped me. It really supported me in those final years when I was thinking about university but not thinking I was good enough. I was really lucky, I went off to university, I studied engineering but later on, I decided to retrain and become a teacher in the hopes that I could give back and make a difference in someone else’s life.

It was while I was teaching, working with young people, that I really wanted to inspire them and raise their aspirations. What I realised while I was teaching was quite profound. Many of the young people that I worked with were already really ambitious. They wanted to do well; they wanted to get good grades at the end of school. But many of them just didn’t feel confident; they didn’t feel that they had the ability within them. These beliefs were so deeply ingrained that many of them thought that even if they did their very best, the best they would ever be able to achieve was a C-grade. Some of them felt that they did not have the right background and that certain opportunities were only available for the privileged few. After some time, I realised that young people needed more than just good teachers. They needed people to support them in terms of seeing the opportunities available to them and supporting them to make the most of these opportunities.

Why do young people join GT Scholars?

So at the moment in England, only about 1 in 3 young people from low-income homes are able to leave school with 5 GCSEs or above and this is, of course, actually quite disheartening. There are many young people who would love to achieve better grades by the end of school, access top universities get into competitive careers but often what happens is that they genuinely have no idea how to do this. The saddest part is that many of them are so full of self-doubt that they don’t even believe that they are capable of achieving this.

What do young people gain from GT Scholars?

GT Scholars is a not-for-profit social enterprise and registered charity. We run after-school courses, workshops and programmes for young people, particularly young people from low-income homes. Our goal is to give them the support they need so they can achieve their academic and career potential. Scholars on our programme receive academic support through tutoring. They also receive coaching or mentoring from undergraduates, graduates and professionals from top universities and leading organisations. Our scholars also get to take part in enrichment activities such as visits to the city, visits to universities and the aim of that is to help them understand the opportunities that are available to them. We also run skill-building days, again, with the aim to help them and support them so they know how to make the most of these opportunities.

What makes your scholars successful?

Over the past few years, we’ve had support from organisations such as Charities Aid Foundation, School For Social Entrepreneurs and The Young Foundation. Our scholars who have been on the programme have been able to move an average of 2 grade points in a year and we’ve even had some of our scholars move from a predicted D grade to achieving A-grade within a year of being on the programme. We are really proud of that. What makes GT Scholars successful is the genuine belief that our tutors and mentors have in our scholars. They invest their time and energy in supporting our scholars and building positive relationships with them. This, in turn, helps our scholars believe in themselves and that helps them realise their strengths and ultimately helps them improve their grades and career prospects. I know I wouldn’t be here today if not for the role models who supported me and believed in me when I was growing up. So if there is anything I have learned over the past through years, it is that anyone can make a difference. An hour a week may seem so small, but those few hours could have such a positive influence on a young person’s life.

GT Scholars is a not-for-profit social enterprise that provides tutoring, mentoring and enrichment that is designed to help young people aged 11-16 achieve their academic and career aspirations. Contact us if you would like to know more about the GT Scholars Programme and how you can join.

We’ve Won the Lloyds Start-up Award From School for Social Entrepreneurs!

by GT Scholars Our Impact

We’re pleased to announce that The GT Scholar’s Programme recently won the Lloyds Start-up Award from the School for Social Entrepreneurs!

What is the Lloyd Start-up Award & The School for Social Entrepreneurs?

Launched in April 2012, the Lloyds Bank Social Entrepreneurs Programme is a partnership between SSE (School for Social Entrepreneurs), Lloyds Bank and The Big Lottery Fund. The award provides funding, mentoring, and training to social enterprises and social entrepreneurs who want to make a huge impact. We are incredibly grateful for this award; we know it will make a huge difference in expanding our offering.

How Will This Help GT Scholars?

This is a huge achievement for us. The grant will help us reach out to new parents and students. In addition, it will help us extend the enrichment programme to students already in the programme.

The Story of GT Scholars

The GT Scholars Programme was founded in November 2013. Temi Kamson, a former engineer turned teacher, founded GT Scholars to support young people in her local neighbourhood. Temi established the programme while working as a teacher and noticed that many of the young people and parents who approached her for after-school tutoring were on free school meals or in low-income homes.

However, they didn’t qualify for support because their grades were too high (e.g. a C-grade). Secondly, they didn’t qualify if their household income was too high (e.g. a single-parent household with an income of £17,000, which is just above the Free School Meals threshold). Lastly, young people couldn’t receive support if the school didn’t have the funding to place them in a programme.

Therefore, the GT Scholars Programme was established to ensure that any young person could access support and didn’t have to live in the right neighbourhood, go to the right school, have the right household income and have the right grades to qualify for support. You can read more about the story of GT Scholars here.