eQuality Time’s mission is to employ original critical thinking to solve problems of inclusion and equality through the use of technology and education.   In practice this means  we have ideas for projects, we apply for funding to prototype or scale them up, and then we work to make them self-funding. We raise around £50,000 a year for our work.

Our flagship projects are White Water Writers, a young adult fiction publisher that has ensured over 1,000 children have held in their hands a book they have written, and Open Voice Factory, an open source software project for people with communication disabilities.

White Water Writers

Our White Water Writers project works with groups of pupils all over the UK (and sometimes abroad. The children we work with write and publish their own novel. The project has enabled over 2,000 children to hold in their hands a book they have written, raising their confidence, skills, and ambition (See here, for a summary of our research).

Being selected for the project has made the students realise that staff see, and value, their academic potential and strong personalities. Also, the students were unaware how much they could achieve when working independently, as their timetable is highly structured and supported. They surprised themselves – A teacher in Stoke.

Groups start with a blank page on Monday morning. They are lead through a series of exercises and activities and publish their own collaboratively written novel on Friday afternoon. Nobody outside the group touches a key during the week: the novel is entirely the work of the students involved.

Find out more at the project website!

The Open Voice Factory

You can find out more at the project website.

Project Real

Fake news and misinformation are rampant online and young people are particularly vunerable to it.

However, the innate problem with teaching students to avoid fake news is that they, quite reasonably, don’t trust that teachers or parents are experts in navigating the complex social relationships of their online lives.

We were given a grant of £40,000 by Not-Equal to research better ways of reaching the students.

We asked: who do they trust? They trust each other, and they trust the people they see as ‘good at’ social media.

So we built a set of resources by arranging for influencers to give a series of talks and Q&A lessons to groups of students and then worked with those students to co-create lesson plans (which included asking the influencers to record short snippets on their area of expertise).

Hundreds of students benefited from our created resources during the pilot – and the project website continues to receive thousands of vists every month.

Comments from teachers

• ‘the videos from the Instagram influencers. That was really good to relate it to the real world, especially when this is becoming a quite an aspiring career to get into.’

• ‘I genuinely think that when I could see lightbulb moments when we were chatting about things, and they were understanding it at the time.’

• ‘I’ve already had staff saying they thought it should be delivered to all year groups. Someone else who didn’t deliver it, but heard about it, asked me if we could use it again next year’

Comments from students

• • ‘I think now we look more aware of how you can spot fake news. And like, it encourages me to like double check or do a lot of research into what I’ve just read.’

  • ‘Project Real definitely made me more confident myself. Like I said before, I know what to do now. Like usually now, when I look at the news, I’ll like double check things to see if any other news, like website has wrote the same thing and like read beyond the headlines.’

  • ‘I feel like I can like when I see it I’d be able to tell if it’s fake news or like fake picture easier than before.’

  • ‘For me, I don’t really look at news that much either. But like, especially when I’m scrolling on social media, like, I tend to kind of look at things, especially Instagram, because I’m like, Oh, I wish I could take photos as perfect as that. And then I’m like, wait, but that isn’t real though.’

Structure

eQuality Time is a charity our Registered Charity Number is 1177233 (Charity application form) and we are registered at: 68 Truro Gardens, Luton, LU3 2AP.   We originally incorporated as a social enterprise on 31st August 2014 in the form of a Company Number of 09197133, and then converted later.

Documents

• articles of incorporation and memorandum are here.
• yearly accounts since incorporation in 2014 are here.
• meeting minutes are in this folder.
• Our insurance documents are here.
• policies are in  this Dropbox folder. Highlights include: