Hidden Talent
Revealed

Digital Advantage is a charity established in 2020 to help young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), gain creative, digital and core skills to help them into employment in the digital economy. We do this by providing strengths-based, experiential learning delivered by industry experts and education professionals from diverse backgrounds. Our award-winning, innovative training and development programmes devised with young people and their support networks, are delivered in a number of settings from outreach programmes at schools across the North West to our Manchester city centre College DISC.

Just how do we reveal that talent?

There are 5 Digital Advantage programmes available, each designed to get the best out of young people.

DISC

In September 2022 we opened our Digital Independent Specialist College (DISC), with partners SENDCode. Based in Manchester City Centre we established the UK's first Independent Specialist College that provides a supported pathway to employment in the digital economy for 16-24 year olds. DISC provides unique, flexible Alternative Provision, Pre-internships and Supported Internships to talented young people with additional needs keen to develop their creative and digital skills and progress towards employment.

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PopUp Digital Agency

Delivered over 30 hours across 5 days, the PopUp Digital Agency is our flagship experiential learning programme giving young people:

  • Experience of working in a realistic digital agency environment.
  • New creative thinking, problem solving, storytelling, business modelling, and digital production skills.
  • An opportunity to build digital assets that will provide ongoing work and enterprise experiences.
  • The a chance at winning a business start-up support package!

Digital Advantage Online

Digital Advantage Online is a series of digital skills workshops that can be delivered as part of our face-to-face training programmes, or more flexibly in shorter chunks to augment the national curriculum over longer periods of time.  Created by trusted expert practitioners these workshops will develop a range of entry level creative and digital skills whilst meeting a range of Gatsby benchmarks.  Digital Advantage Online currently has over 50 hours of learning in:

  • Branding
  • Photography
  • Videography
  • Website Design
  • Podcasting
  • Storytelling coming soon!
  • Social Media coming soon!

Your DNA

Your Digital News Agency (Your DNA), is where we train and support young people to create local news stories, content, features or social action campaigns; build a brand and a website and create an online Digital News Agency for the school. We provide hands-on digital work experiences on campus. From written content to brand design, coding, videography, podcasting, storytelling, and pre-and post-production, we enable professional production techniques, community engagement and ongoing digital work experiences. Used alongside our 2-hour teacher CPD (Continued Professional Development), and DA-Online suite of training, this can prove a really powerful tool for ongoing skills and work experience for young people. We can only deliver these with the relevant funding in place.

Blast

Taking place across 4 days over a school term and with a focus on social good, Blast sees our industry standard training work with Year 5 and 6 primary age students working on a brief selected by, and important to, their school. With a focus on social good, students will develop a project under industry guidance which they then continue in school alongside expert mentors before launching their work to the wider school community.

Over 1000 young people reached.
So far...

You will currently find us working in Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cheshire, West Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Liverpool. Click on a location below to find out more about our work in each place...

"The teaching provided by DA was inspirational, differentiated and well informed. The trainer built a strong, professional and appropriate relationship with each student."

Paul Rogers: North Ridge High School

Keep up to date

If you have any news that you would like to share with us, get in touch and we'll tell your story. We also write articles for online publications, so to keep in touch with news and upcoming events, make sure you sign up to our blog and social media channels.

Your DNA – Empowering SEND Students Through Digital Storytelling

Your Digital News Agency, or Your DNA for short, is Digital Advantage's outreach programme. Your DNA goes into schools and colleges across the North West, delivering an intensive and incredibly valuable digital work experience programme.
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Echoes of the Caribbean – Preserving the Past, Empowering the Future

We're delighted to announce the release of the fourth captivating episode of our podcast, Echoes of the Caribbean. A vibrant journey through the stories and experiences of the Windrush Generation.
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Your DNA Manchester

Your Digital News Agency Celebration: Showcasing Young Talent Across Greater Manchester On Friday 7th March, we marked another fantastic year of Your Digital News Agency (or Your DNA), our flagship outreach programme empowering young people to develop digital skills and creative confidence. The celebration event took place at Heron House, home to the Greater Manchester

Digital Advantage wins Gold Award

Digital Advantage are proud to announce that they have recently been awarded the Neuro Diversity Employment Index (NDEI) Gold Award by Autistica, the UKs leading research led campaigning organisation for Autism.  The NDEI® is the only gold-standard evidence-based framework of its kind in the UK and we are immensely proud to be one of only

Celebrating a decade of outreach programmes in Lancashire.

Digital Advantage is delighted to announce that once again they have secured funding from our long-term partners at Future U and Lancashire County Council to run outreach activities at schools and colleges across the county, in the academic year 2024/25. This long-standing collaboration started in 2014; over that time more than a thousand students have
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Digital Skills Partners for Schools and Colleges

For 7 years now we have been running unique digital skills programmes with schools from across the region, and they are still a fantastic way of helping young people equip themselves for life in the 21st century and for schools to work with industry experts to inspire the next generation of digital makers. This year’s
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What are the press saying?

422 Podcast Club

422

On the A6 Manchester Road in Longsight stands 422 https://422manchester.org/. A Manchester Vinyard project, restoring this magnificent building to create a warm and welcoming community hub, hosting an affordable cafe and kitchen, after school clubs, community pantry, free groups and space for hire for like minded groups and events and services to help alleviate poverty
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DISC

Launch of DISC

Digital Advantage is proud to announce that DISC, the Digital Independent Specialist College in Manchester, has celebrated completing it’s first half term by welcoming ten new interns. They started their exciting journey in September, completing a four week induction, experimenting with digital photography, video, storyboarding, animation, graphics, scriptwriting, UX design, podcasting and web design. Be sure
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‘Pop-up’ digital agency gives 100s of Lancashire teens a taste for business

Classroom life – Walken High School

We have worked with Josh Mangas at Walkden High school for a number of years, taking Digital Advantage both into School and Salford College, where his students gained valuable work experience developing their own digital projects. In this article Joshua Mangas explains how working with industry is helping to change the fortune of disadvantaged young

BUILDING ON THE STRENGTH WITHIN

In August 2017 we worked with Sefton Borough Council to deliver our PopUp programme with a group of teenagers who were at risk of offending or non-school attendance. Children & Young People Now magazine featured the project in this months issue.

Digital Advantage is supported by

Coop Foundation

and supported by

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