Using sport to mentor vulnerable young people
Claire Walford
Joe Chlebik, Andy Cheshire and Clem Studholme founded 0161 Education out of a desire to engage young people, currently on the fringes of the education system, through sport-based mentoring.
Despite only being a year old, the organisation is already making a big impact on young people in Manchester and Salford. Joe attended our National Network Gathering in October, and we caught up with him afterwards.
What is your background and how did it lead you to set up 0161 Education?
I’ve always been passionate about getting alongside young people who are struggling and marginalised in society. Over the last decade, I’ve worked with many violent young people including people on the brink of exclusion within a High School and at a Primary School Pupil Referral Unit. I oversaw the expansion of the children and young people's department of Healthy Relationships charity, Talk Listen Change (TLC), into Oldham and Tameside and spent countless hours with perpetrators of domestic abuse, both parents and children, thinking about negative behaviour patterns, anger and how to build healthy relationships.
Time and again, I witnessed the power of sport to help disenfranchised young people. A few years ago, Andy Cheshire and I set up a Saturday night football project for teenagers in Manchester and that experience sowed the seeds for a lot of what we do now at 0161 Education.
What sort of provision does 0161 Education offer?
0161 Education tries to engage children and young people in a way other organisations may not be able to. All our team are from Greater Manchester and understand the challenges - both socio-economic and criminal- of growing up in the city. Many of them have faced difficulties themselves but have chosen a pathway away from criminality, violence, and unhealthy relationships. The kids relate well to our staff as they know they are locals with similar accents and a heart for our community.
With the support of schools, social workers, parents, carers and other stakeholders, we provide children and young people with an opportunity to change their mindset, grow, and make choices that are best for them and those around them.
The structure and content of our sessions are tailored to each individual child. We mostly provide sports-based mentoring. We play a lot of sport – there is huge value in individual sports. We often start with boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, kick boxing, and MMA (mixed martial arts). Through these sessions the young people learn the importance of self-discipline, focus, respecting the opposition and self-control. It is fairly inward looking. But we also add team sports to the mix, usually football and rugby, and through playing with others, the young people develop team working skills and learn how to collaborate and support others as well as a raft of other emotions.
The funding for the sessions come from the Local Authority or local schools. Some children have one or two sessions per week, others come every day. The sessions can be for an hour or 3 hours, morning, or afternoon. We vary our mentoring programmes according to the needs of the child. Sometimes a young person might be having a bad day, and you abandon what you were planning to do and just chat about what’s going on. Most of the young people enjoy coming – we try to make the centre feel like a safe space and always welcoming.
Your work is incredibly challenging – how and why do you keep going?
It takes a huge amount of drive and passion to do this work. It can be extremely hard, knowing how to absorb and respond to the trauma and emotions of young people. So many children have been left behind and don’t have a voice. But working one-to-one with a teenager and seeing them begin to thrive is the reason we come to work every day. It is so rewarding – the positives definitely outweigh the negatives. But you need to be realistic about the sort of work you are doing and how complicated it can be.
It is so encouraging when you see a child return to mainstream education who has previously been out of the system or when you see them beginning to build healthy relationships with others. Some of the young people we work with have been out of school for five years or more and through our mentoring, we begin to see them open up and engage with education for the first time. I’ve seen many children who can’t be bothered with anything and think no one likes them or cares about them and through boxing or MMA, they have grown in self-esteem and confidence and started thinking about college, getting a job, or doing some training. Progress is never linear, but it is heart-warming when young people begin to learn from their mistakes and we see positive behaviour change.
How does the work of 0161 Education prevent children from being groomed and drawn into criminal child exploitation?
Many of the children we work with are on the verge of criminal exploitation. They all know about county lines and see the lure of it. They often know older children involved in gang life and are attracted to some of the positive elements such as new clothes, trainers, and money. They don’t understand the county lines model and how they will be used and exploited by people further up the chain who are making vast sums of money out of them and won’t stop at anything to make money.
Through conversations and mentoring, we try to show there are other options for young people. Teenagers aren’t necessarily attracted to traditional academic jobs, but we talk about other routes and jobs which will provide money and stability and a peaceful life where you’re not constantly living in fear of gangs and the police.
We build such strong relationships with the young people in our programmes that they don’t feel they are being lectured – it's just a conversation in which we are trying to challenge some of the ways the county lines lifestyle has been glamourised.
What advice would you give someone if they wanted to replicate what you are doing in other cities?
Building a strong relationship with the local council is vital. Salford Council has been extremely supportive as we’ve set up. We worked hard to get our policies and paperwork in place so we could become an approved provider for the council. Once this was established through The Chest (the North West's Local Authority Procurement Portal), it meant that schools had confidence to work with us and the work has flowed from there.
What are the main challenges you face as an organisation?
Keeping on top of everything! The complexities of having our own building, keeping the children happy, supporting the staff, having all the right policies and paperwork in place are never ending! The behind-the-scenes logistics are the most challenging aspect of running 0161 Education but they are so important as they enable us to do the frontline work which we are passionate about.
What are your hopes for 2026?
We are currently in our first full academic year, so we are looking forward to seeing the difference our mentoring programmes make in the lives of young people. We are excited about how far some of them have already come, in terms of their physical and emotional wellbeing, and we are looking forward to seeing even more progress in the next six months.
We are hoping to develop formal awards and qualifications for the young people who go through our programme and we would like to expand to reach even more young people. We are beginning to do more Forest School type outdoor activities – we see a lot of similarity between sport and outdoors education – so this could be a new avenue for us to explore.
