Guest blog: Marking our JET partnership on International Day of Charity

At the Jon Egging Trust, we are extremely proud of our long-standing partnership with NATS. As a growing, national charity we know that by working in partnership with top-class organisations, we are greater than the sum of our parts.

Indeed, our unique partnership model has been at the heart of our methodology for changing young people’s lives through inspiration, teamwork and leadership for the last 12 years. I set up JET in 2012, in memory of my husband Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging who died in August 2011 as he came in to land after the Bournemouth Air Festival.

Jon believed that his world of aviation had the power to change lives, and in particular the lives of young people from rurally deprived areas (where many of the airbases in the UK are situated). Many of them might look up at the skies and think that the people who fly, design and maintain aircraft could never be them. Jon’s dream was to break down the invisible barriers which can exist between airbases and their local communities, and to prove how aviation and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) could be an important mechanism to bridge this divide and bring people together.

This is why, at JET, our programmes work with a range of inspirational people and environments linked to aviation and STEM, giving young people first class ‘out of the classroom’ workplace experiences. This in turn helps them to re-engage with education, improve their grades and to think about what they might like to do in the future.

Jon and I talked about this often, especially as my job at the time involved working with young people from some of the toughest boroughs in London through my role leading youth programmes. When Jon died, I instinctively knew that I needed to take action and to turn our musings into reality, and so the Jon Egging Trust and our Blue Skies programme was born.

Blue Skies is unique in that we work with young people aged 12-15 over three years who are struggling at school and starting to turn away from education, taking them on a journey – guided by our curriculum and our expert youth programmes team – that helps to inspire them through 108hrs of face-to-face support and 15 out of the classroom visits to exceptional workplaces connected to aviation and STEM. We currently work with 36 corporate and 24 military partners to deliver our programmes in nine regions across the UK, stretching from Cornwall to North Wales and across to Lincolnshire and East Anglia.

We are the only youth charity in the UK that provides this level of long-term, early intervention support, and our work makes a real difference. Last year, teachers reported that 90% of all Blue Skies students increased in confidence, and almost two thirds improved their attitude to learning as a direct result of Blue Skies. Meanwhile, 67% of students reported an increase in their confidence and communication skills, and almost 60% reported improvements in their resilience and leadership skills.

Over the last eight years, our students from Hampshire and Dorset have had exceptional experiences thanks to the NATS team – ranging from visits to the Air Traffic Control Tower at Heathrow, hearing from Air Traffic Controllers, getting hands-on in the simulators, to even being hosted at the Royal International Air Tattoo by NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe.

For young people who do not get the opportunity to travel very far very often, these transformational experiences help them to understand the ‘point’ of school by showing them the exciting career opportunities that exist and, importantly, giving students the confidence and support they need to help them to fulfil their potential and reach for the stars.

NATS supports two corporate charity partners, Aerobility and the Jon Egging Trust (JET), enabling them to improve the lives of those they support. We also contribute to the areas where our employees live and work, through our internal Community Fund scheme, helping to build strong, sustainable and safe communities linked to causes our employees care deeply about. Our employees have also supported over 130 charities in the last financial year through our payroll giving initiative, Give As You Earn, recently being awarded Platinum status.