"Bringing Communities Together Through Young People"
AcaFit
AYA developed the AcaFit course which combines academic teaching with health, fitness and wellbeing. The idea was developed from a purely voluntary exercise where young professionals gave up their time to help young people in their local community to gain better academic results. It was then taken up by a local charity, the Asian Resource Centre of Croydon and funded through the NW Croydon regeneration fund.

This supplementary educational course was designed for final year GCSE students to access educational support and health and fitness instruction in an unconventional style and atmosphere. It concentrated on the core subjects of Maths and Science and a fitness program based around the martial art Win Chung.

A crucial part of the course was to provide a health and fitness programme to improve the student’s health and health awareness and a ‘healthy body, healthy mind’ ethos was promoted. Each session was for 3 hours which comprised of approximately 2 hours Academic Tutoring and a 1 hour Health & Fitness programme. Boys and girls were taught separately.

The proof of the success of the programme are in the results; out of the 24 young people that took part all but 1 achieved 5 A-C GCSEs or higher.