Focus on Life Chances

Peckham suffers from deprivation. The statistics bear this out, including low educational achievement at all stages, high unemployment, low incomes, low birth weights and a lot of long term chronic illness. Supporting young people, tackling poverty and worklessness are key to improving life chances of Peckham residents.

Supporting Young People

We see our young people as being very important. Compared to the rest of Southwark, SE15 has a very high proportion of under 15s. Through education, youth work and supporting their aspirations we can help them achieve their potential. One major challenge is to prevent young people from becoming victims or perpetrators of crime.

Working with partners in the community, the Council and other agencies, Peckham Programme supports young people and their families in a variety of ways. In particular it seeks to help achieve Young Southwark’s outcomes locally.

Spaces for young people include the refurbished BMX track, which with luck will be training young riders for the Olympics. There are also the sports pitches at Spark in Brimmington Park and the supervised activities for 8 to 13-year-olds at Central Venture Park in Kelly Avenue.

Peckham Programme has aimed to ensure there are activities out there to support the aspirations of young people by nurturing and supporting a range of organisations like Southwark Tigers Cheerleaders, Peckham Town FC, the From Boyhood to Manhood Foundation, the Eternal Life Support Centre, Wisegem and many more. It has also initiated popular events directed at young people like Star Academy and ensured their participation in other festivals such as I Love Peckham and healthy eating events at Flavas.

See Young Peckham – Peckham’s future for more details about the range of support and activities provided by Peckham Programme.

The local wardens also do a lot of work with young people for example running recycling projects in primary schools, activities in the school holidays with the older children and much more.

Tackling poverty and worklessness

Nearly half the population of Peckham is poor or borderline poor. Today sees Peckham with the highest level of unemployment in Southwark, the highest number of people who have never worked and a lot of residents in low paid jobs. An important aspect of improving local prosperity is removing barriers and increasing our community's access to employment, especially the good jobs in central London, the City and Docklands, areas clearly visible through the glass walls of the Peckham library lifts.

Aiming to get access to employment or better employment for our adult population is crucial to Peckham Programme’s business and economy agenda. Approaches include promoting better childcare, training and career development or ‘whole neighbourhood’ approaches to tackling deprivation.

While promoting routes into work for residents, another part of this business and economy agenda is to increase financial inclusion. It works with Southwark's credit union to promote services for the thousands of Peckham residents who don't have access to mainstream financial products such as bank accounts and are, in many case, reliant on doorstep lenders charging punitive interest rates for loans.

Contact us

Peckham Programme
Tel: 020 7525 1021
getinvolvedinpeckham@southwark.gov.uk
9 Blenheim Grove
London
SE15 4QS