Southampton Street Pastors’ three years of patrolling the city centre at night provided a proven and solid base on which to branch out into the Ascension Trust initiative “School Pastors’.

With funding secured for 2012 we were able to appoint a full time coordinator and pilot the School Pastors scheme at two secondary schools chosen by the council. Patrols began after the half term break in February 2012.

Since then we have grown and developed our weekly afternoon patrol, also covering some mornings; we supported the year 6 transition week with a whole week of mornings and afternoons at both schools and did the same during the first week of the new term. We have also developed links with the feeder schools whilst on patrol.

Building on these successes, the police and council have asked us to go into parks and strategic areas and put on additional patrols during early evening. We have successfully piloted this over the summer and are now recruiting for our new teams.

In light of this, and changes to school names in our area (to ‘academy’ etc.), we have decided to change our name back to Street Pastors and develop a ‘youth & community’ branch which gives us greater flexibility in the range of work we can do with young people to offer safety, reassurance and support, through listening, caring and helping.