Sabrina Jones is the Founder and Chief Executive of Say It With Your Chest.  Sabrina has spent the majority of her career working with young people in various educational establishments.  In these roles she saw first hand how persistent disruptive behaviour escalated into students getting fixed period and permanently excluded.  She saw how being excluded from school and not being engaged in education can negatively impact young people’s future prospects and decided to leave her full time job and use her first class psychology degree, personal and work experiences to set up Say It With Your Chest.

Say It With Your Chest is a social enterprise that has three aims:- To reduce the rate of fixed period and permanent exclusion by decreasing persistent disruptive behaviour, empower young people to raise their aspirations and break their negative behaviour cycles and inform public and policy awareness.

Say It With Your Chest focusses on reducing exclusions because research has shown that not being engaged in education or being excluded from school is a strong indicator for those at risk of involvement in youth violence.  Say It With Your Chest tackles part of the problem by running a preventative 12 week programme with students who based on statistics provided by the Department of Education are the highest risk of getting excluded (students who receive free school meals, students with special educational needs and students from the black and ethnic community).  The programme consists of bespoke workshops and 1:1 mentoring sessions which look at why the behaviours which can lead to being excluded are occurring.  The programme also gives young people a voice, by engaging them in conversations regarding how they can be better supported to stay in school and engaged with their education.  Currently, students might rightly feel that all decisions around their education and lives are made by others; this can leave them feeling disempowered.

Recent achievements for Say It With Your Chest in 2019 include, speaking on BBC Asian Network and on a panel at the Houses of Parliament.  Say It With Your Chest will be able to launch a pilot in partnership with local councils in 2020 thanks to the help of the Shackleton Foundation.