Vintage teams up with Football Beyond Borders for school poetry session

Vintage Books and education charity Football Beyond Borders have teamed up for a poetry and spoken word session for footballer Eniola Aluko’s new book, They Don’t Teach This (Yellow Jersey).

Football Beyond Borders developed a "Leadership and Poetry" workshop, with Aluko joining the session in Brixton to work with a group of 15-year-old girls, basing a group discussion around key extracts and life lessons from the book. The girls wrote poems and created spoken word pieces as a response to these and performed them back to the group.

There are plans for more educational and community activity between Vintage, They Don’t Teach This and Football Beyond Borders in 2020.

“Aluko’s They Don’t Teach This steps beyond the realms of memoir to explore themes of dual nationality and identity, race and institutional prejudice, success, failure and faith,” Vintage said of the book published last August. “It is an inspiring manifesto to change the way readers and the future generation choose to view the challenges that come in their life applying life lessons with raw truths of Eni’s own personal experience.”

Aluko was appointed UN Women UK ambassador with a focus on promoting gender empowerment in 2016, and in October 2018 she was named by Marie Claire as one of 10 Future Shapers Award Winners, recognising individuals who are changing women’s futures for the better. She has a first-class law degree and also writes a weekly column for the Guardian.

Football Beyond Borders works with more than 1,000 young people each week in over 40 schools across the UK with students who "are passionate about football but underachieving at school", the charity said.