Mati Champions Service Through English-Speaking Scheme in Sicily
10 September 2025 - All
Here at Wycombe Abbey, service remains one of our core values and continues to shape our School ethos. We take immense pride in seeing our pupils carry this spirit of service beyond the School gates. This summer, Mati (LVI) played a key role in establishing and running an English-teaching scheme in her home city of Catania. Read on to discover the fantastic success of this initiative.
‘Last December, I began brainstorming ideas and projects that could lead me to give back some of my summer. I am from a city called Catania in Sicily, where educational poverty is unfortunately very common.
I feel as though I had a duty to share the knowledge and skills gained through the opportunities I have had at School and more broadly. My friend in New York and I, both from Catania, decided to set up an English-teaching scheme.
With our idea written up and carefully prescribed, I contacted the mayor of Catania and presented the project. Our aim was to create a collaborative teaching space for fun, outdoor games and group activities. We certainly did not want it to feel like a boring classroom; we wanted to encourage confidence with the language and inspire them to want to achieve more.
We were met with immediate enthusiasm and were supported by the council of education who put us in contact with Save the Children. This charity, who works with children from difficult backgrounds, gave us three groups: with ages ranging from 9-14. In the first lesson, we were pleased to have the mayor and various news reporters there to inaugurate and document the scheme. It was extremely emotional seeing the young people getting so excited about being on the news, and it meant a lot to us to have our project be exposed on a national platform. It gave us confidence that this initiative was truly worthwhile.
Each lesson contained a mixture of worksheets, group activities and games to keep the energy high. It was extremely rewarding seeing these children so enthusiastic and affectionate towards us. By our last lesson, some were already asking when we would be back to do more! It was a unique and wonderful experience that not only taught me a lot about scenarios of poverty that we often don’t see, but it also taught me the value of the little things. Even just a hug or a ‘well done’ meant the world to these children, seeing their faces light up with smiles was an incomparable experience.
Since finishing lessons in July, we have been meeting with various council members to discuss next steps. We would love to come back at other points in the year, we even discussed expanding the project, giving other pupils our age who have done an exchange year in an English-speaking country the opportunity to teach.’
I am very excited to see where this project may go and I am especially proud of its success so far!
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