AT the start of this summer’s school holidays, 16-year-old Jessica Purton from Wiltshire was feeling pretty low. During her GCSE exams she had experienced several epileptic fits. Jessica is also dyslexic.

She was fearful that she might not get the grades required to be able to get into a further education college. She was hanging around the house and lying in bed until late in the morning.

It was then that her father, David Purton, heard about a local summer challenge initiative, a programme of activities aimed at helping 16-year-olds at risk of disengaging from education and training.

The three phase county-wide scheme running from May to late August aspires to enable young people to regain their self-confidence to the point where they feel ready to return to learning.

Phase one involves taking part in challenging outdoor activities such as rock-climbing, high rope work, canoeing, caving and potholing. There are also residential weeks away from home on Outward Bound courses in the Brecon Beacons or on conservancy projects.

The second phase enables those taking part to gain accreditation such as basic certificates in car mechanics, child care or food hygiene. Acquiring such qualifications should increase people’s educational chances and employability.

The third phase involves ensuring that the participants move into further education, training or employment. The key event here is a three-day programme when employers demonstrate what it is like to fillet fish, bake bread, dress a wound or attend a crime scene.

Jessica Purton, who has now enrolled on a national vocational qualification level 2 health and beauty course, said that taking part in the activities had been very helpful in building her confidence.

“I had quite low self-esteem at the start of the summer holidays. I had just finished my GCSEs and things had been going quite badly. I felt I was not going to get the grades I needed to get into college because of my epilepsy and dyslexia. I was lying around in bed and not going out because I did not want to be seen having fits. I was just doing nothing most of the time.

“But then I joined the programme and did abseiling, climbing, team-building activities and tackled an army assault course. That was really good fun. Other young people were really supportive because we were all in the same boat. We cheered each other on to help each other’s confidence.”

David Purton said: “Our experience has been that it really turned things round for Jessica during the summer - it gave her lots of confidence and got her back engaged in purposeful activity.

“The things that helped her most initially were the physical challenges - problem-solving activities and climbing. But, later on, she did things like motor mechanics, which raised her self-esteem in that she was being successful at things she had never tried before. It was also the whole companionable thing and having to get up in the morning and be there to catch a minibus at normal getting-up time.

“She actually had four fits when they were away on a residential and overcame the embarrassment of that because she found the other young people and adults very supportive.”

Mark Joslin Williams, a Wiltshire youth worker who helps to run the programme, said that more than 150 young people in the county had taken part this summer and so far all of them were either going on to work-based learning, vocational courses such as plumbing or bricklaying, or taking GCSEs.

The Wiltshire programme of summer activities is one of many to have been piloted during the past two years. The character of the schemes varies. For example, in Staffordshire, groups of young people also get the opportunity to bid for up to pound;800 to support an educational activity such as climbing Snowdon or going to the theatre.

In Nottinghamshire, summer activities are broken down into five phases and young people are assigned to transitional workers who are responsible for helping them into further training or employment.

Now activity schemes are being rolled out throughout England to 47 Connexion Service partnership areas and are being given a national identity: uproject. Participants will be awarded uproject certificates which will show that they have completed the programme and attract national recognition.

Over the next three years, it is intended that up to 60,000 young people who are unsure about their future after leaving school will have the opportunity to take part.

Mr Williams said that the Wiltshire programme “has been tremendously effective in engaging young people who were otherwise very likely totally to disengage from education and leave school with few or no qualifications. With very few employment opportunities available to them, such people would be much more at risk of taking to crime.”

There are now high hopes that such success will be repeated throughout England, with perhaps fewer disaffected young people hanging about the streets in future.

The New Opportunities Fund is supporting uproject activities for young people with pound;34 million of National Lottery money, the DfESConnexions Service national unit is overseeing the scheme’s roll-out nationally and Barclays is sponsoring the uproject website and financial literacy training for young people.