Youth worker Ian Clarkson ran Youth Alpha at Leyland St Mary's Catholic School, Lancashire. Here he tells the story...

In 2004 I went to the first Youth Alpha conference to check out the updated layout and materials. I loved it, we tried it with our young people at King's Church straight away and it went down really well.
In the first week of the new term, in September 2004, I had a phone call out of the blue from Kevin Regan, the Chaplain at Leyland St Mary's Catholic school. Leyland were about to have their annual mission week and wondered if I or anyone I knew might be able to come in and do something.

He was really looking for people who were musical and we went in with with a band called 'My Spoon'. They explained why they sang songs about God and then got the kids to write a song. The kids loved it.
During one of the last sessions, the priest of St Mary's in Leyland came in to see how things were going and said to me, 'Do you know anything about Youth Alpha?' He asked straight away if it would be possible to run a course in the school.

In February 2005 Kevin and I started running it with a group from Year 10 (14-15 year olds). They were having confirmation classes at that time so Alpha complimented that well.
Extraordinarily, the headmaster of the school really encouraged the pupils to come along. He strode straight into an assembly and said, 'If you want to go to the end of year camp [an outward bounds camp which the kids loved] then you need to go on things like Youth Alpha.'

Kevin also went around key pupils he knew would get a lot out of it and we ended up with an average of about 20-25 who came week-in, week-out. It was the perfect number of people and even mix of boys and girls.

We had an hour from 3.15pm and we'd begin with some crisps and drink which they'd devour in no time at all. Then we'd often have a silly icebreaker game or something for 5-10 minutes.
Then I'd try and pack in as much of the talk as possible, using as many DVD clips, interactive stuff and stories as I could - they loved all that.

At first there were some very definite cliques within the group so Kevin and I split them up in the games and after about session four they were saying to us, 'We've been in school for four years with these people and it's only now we've got to know each other.'

For the Holy Spirit sessions, Kevin rang up a prayer house near Crosby, Liverpool. He contacted the year 10 head to see if she could drive the minibus and she was glad to help out.
So we took about 24 on this away day, during school time, and it was amazing. The place we were staying at was a big old detached Victorian house just two minutes walk from the beach.
We had our meals together, went down to the beach, played some games, did our session, watched the sunset.

At points during the day we had a times of quiet where we asked the Holy Spirit to come and minister to us. Some pupils went and spent time alone outside, in the chapel or sitting where they were - they took it very seriously.

The rest of the course went really well and at the end we gave them all a questionnaire to see what they thought about the course. Some said that during the time of the course they had asked God into their life and put down that now they were a Christian now, so that was wonderful.

The following year's head boy and head girl both came out of that group.
I continue to be involved at Leyland with assemblies, R.E. lessons and other activities. There is a new Chaplain there now, Gemma and we hope to run another Youth Alpha soon - perhaps linking in with the National Youth Alpha Weekend.