"During the Ryton Churches October 24-7, around 120 students from the comprehensive school round the corner from our prayer room venue spent time in the prayer room, many of them returning, some daily. Christian students brought their friends. Those friends returned with other friends. The time of maximum numbers was the school lunch break, and this caused the students to identify other possibilities: 7am, free periods for sixth-formers, after tea, which involved return bus journeys - one such group stayed for three hours. We discovered the next week that the school had operated a ‘crowd control’ policy whereby only 25 students in years 7, 8 and 9 were given lunch-out passes each day, as the school assumed that would be as many as we could cope with in the prayer room (years 10+ needing no lunch-out passes and they came as they wished).” Tom Jamieson

Tom is an Anglican vicar and hosts a group of leaders from the local Ryton URC, Catholic, Methodist and Anglican churches. They obtained a £1000 grant from a youth fund and used it to set up the 24-7 Prayer room in the local URC, because of it’s close proximity (100metres) to the comprehensive school.

Tom’s tips for hosting a successful Prayer Space in Schools include;
“Hospitality first! The way in to the URC Hall is through a large room with kitchen facilities so this became ‘Coffee Shop’, serving from 7am until 9pm each day of our 24-7.

At-your-own-pace engagement with prayer second! The Coffee Shop opened into the main hall where we established a library of Christian literature (in gazebo, with house-plants, easy chairs, cushions, atmospheric lighting - a delightful place to be and to browse), and various stations where you could be creative on a theme: painting pebbles, cellophane stained-glass windows... This main hall was also the venue of various workshops through the course of the week.”

Tom did a series of assemblies with each year-group (including the sixth-form) in the school and offered an open invitation to them to come visit. He was also invited in to do two year 11 RE lessons - many of the students in these classes were ones that came regularly to the prayer room.
(Fuller report available)