With more and more communication taking place online, Riverside is committed to making the internet more accessible to our communities. By sharing the experiences of those making their first steps in the digital world we showcase just how much it can improve day to day life.

Riverside’s employment and training project worker in Leicester, Sasha Lawrence-Jackson, is working with tenant Jacqueline Bayliss, who is already seeing the benefits.

Jacqueline, 49, referred to the employment and training team at our community engagement summer event, Leicester Riverside Festival, is registered disabled with special educational needs. As a child Jacqueline attended High Leys School in Leicester instead of the mainstream school, she is low in confidence and panics easily in a learning environment. Never given the opportunity to do GCSEs, or any of the equivalent alternatives, Jacqueline is currently receiving benefits and wants to find a job but struggles to understand the application forms and online processes.

Until these digital sessions, Jacqueline had never used the internet.

With access to her partner’s tablet and desktop at home, she only used them to play games but had no experience of messaging or searching for information via the web.

Working together over four sessions, Sasha has shown Jacqueline basic IT skills – i.e. how to create, send and receive an email and register for things such as job matching including a local cleaning agency – and Jacqueline has left each session with different tasks to achieve, such as searching for vacancies and reading, deleting and retrieving messages from her inbox.

Jacqueline says she is finding the sessions really interesting, helpful and an enjoyable learning experience, so much so, that she has requested Sasha to look for an education course that she could attend on a part time basis to improve her functional skills in Maths and English, and further improve her IT knowledge.

“Sasha has been great to work with. Being able to email is helping me find and apply for jobs, it’s really exciting to use.”

Sasha and local agency Remploy are now looking for adult education opportunities accessible to Jacqueline.