A Northern Ireland charity have held a number of workshops to help refugee children settle into life in Northern Ireland.
Holywood based Sapahara which gets its name from the Hindi word for Journey, aim to help children facing marginalisation both locally and globally.
Their Be The Change programme began in lockdown and now it is being delivered to school children across NI in order to help newcomer children settle in.
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"We really believe that every child deserves a quality education that is about valuing them as a person, where they come from and who they are," the charity founder and former teacher Dr Christine Burnett told Belfast Live.
"We know that here in Northern Ireland we have increasing numbers of newcomer children and our primary schools now have 90 different mother tongues being spoken.
"It is becoming a greater priority for schools to create a welcoming place for these children and we also know that there is a lot of pushback that comes as more refugees and asylum seekers arrive here."
Dr Burnett said that the charity are trying to inspire the sixth form students who are on their year long 'Be The Change' programme to create inclusive communities for the children arriving in Northern Ireland.
As part of the programme, Saphara are working with school in areas of high social deprivation in Belfast which have a high percentage of newcomer children.
"Newcomer children are not a problem to be solved, it is something to be celebrated but you need to equip both the young people who are young adults are coming up to take their place in society but also young teachers," Dr Burnett added.
"We have student teachers who had participated in the programme a couple of weeks ago who are now back as student volunteers."
One of those student teachers, Adam Audley said that he found the programme to be very rewarding.
"It has been amazing working with children who you wouldn't have had the chance to work with on placement," he said.
"Our theme for the week is 'being connected' so we have had children from all around the world from Sudan, from Poland, so we were able to show that we are all connected through different activities."
The teacher training aspect of the programme involved bringing eight students from Stranmillis and eight from St Mary's together to collaborate on the project.
"Saphara has always been about education and we have been inspiring sixth form students to be local and global citizens since we began 15 years ago," Dr Burnett said.
"A lot of what we were doing involved taking young people to India and during coronavirus that had to stop.
"Schools came to us and asked if we could create a new programme as we were seeing an increase in families coming to Northern Ireland.
"In response to that, we created Be The Change which is a head, hand and heart programme."
The Be The Change programme sees participants come together to look at the challenges faced by newcomer children when they arrive in Northern Ireland, engaging with those children to find out about their experience and create a welcome week.
Dr Burnett said that the programme has made a major impact with visible shifts in children's attitudes towards refugee children upon completion of the programme.
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