8 Min Read
30 September 2025
Prayer spaces aim to enable children and young people in schools across the world to explore life’s questions, spirituality, and faith in a safe, creative, and interactive way.
We started dreaming and scheming (and, believe it or not, writing ideas onto sticky notes) about a Prayer Spaces in Schools book more than ten years ago. However, this feels like the right time to publish the book, for a number of reasons:
Firstly, recent research by the Bible Society and Barna Group (amongst others) suggests that there is rapidly growing interest in prayer, the Bible, and Jesus, particularly amongst young people. Prayer spaces in schools provide a safe, welcoming context for children and young people (whether they have a faith or not) to explore their questions around spirituality and prayer in a creative and interactive way.
In many ways, it feels like prayer spaces were made for such a time as this.
Secondly, research suggests that children and young people are finding life increasingly difficult – traumatic even – and prayer spaces can help in small, but sometimes significant, ways. The number of children suffering with mental health difficulties is rising and overall wellbeing is declining. Despite being more ‘connected’ than any previous generation (via social media), children and young people often find relationships more difficult to navigate and they feel more alone and isolated. And as they become more aware of what’s going on around the world, they become more anxious about it too.
Prayer spaces are safe places for children and young people to reflect on some of this ‘inner world’ stuff, and prayer spaces can help them to become more reconciled – more at peace – with themselves, with others and with the world. The research we conducted in partnership with York St John University in 2017 into how children and young people were using prayer spaces in their schools confirms all of this, and half of the book focuses on the findings and the application of that research, and on the stories that illustrate it.
I love all of the stories in the book. And I also love all the ones that I had to leave out of the book because we didn’t have enough space to include them. Every story is remarkable. For me, every story describes a miracle.
However, if you really want me to choose, I’m going to choose two. The first is simply the feedback that an 8-year-old girl wrote onto a big sheet of paper at the end of her hour in a prayer space in her school. ‘It was really fun,’ she began… which was a good start! ‘It made me see God everywhere I look,’ she continued. What an extraordinary thing to say! That’s probably one of the things I long for in my own life – to be able to see where God is at work, all around me, all the time. And then she concluded: ‘God has spoken to me.’ I don’t know what God said, nor how God spoke to her, but that was her confident conclusion.
The second story is the one that takes up a good chunk of chapter 3 of the book. Isi was a 14-year-old from Germany when she came to one of our Prayer Spaces in Schools Day Conferences in London, along with a school teacher and her youth worker. When I chatted with her afterwards, she said that she loved everything about the Conference, but she couldn’t imagine a prayer space working in her school back in Germany. She explained that there were only a couple of other Christian pupils that she was aware of, and that local Christians weren’t allowed to visit and serve schools in Germany like they are in Great Britain.
Nevertheless, four months later, Isi emailed to tell us about the prayer space that she’d organised and hosted in her school, and the stories she told of the impact that it had on the pupils and the staff were incredible. In fact, her email was so inspiring that I copied most of it directly into the book (with her permission).
Isi’s was the first prayer space in a school in Germany, but there have been dozens more since then. This is one of my favourite stories for lots of reasons, especially because of the final line of her email, which said,
‘It’s weird and sooo cool. Since we’ve done this I think nothing is impossible, and I can do anything with God.’
You can read so many stories like this in the book:
After more than 17 years of running prayer spaces in schools, we’ve learned quite a lot about how to run them really well, and a few things about how not to run them badly. And these prayer spaces have taken place in a lot of different contexts too – for example, we’ve tracked and support prayer spaces in at least 37 nations so far, and many of these nations have very different education systems and church cultures. There’s more to learn, of course, but we have a growing network of practitioners with lots of accumulated wisdom and experience to help most people who want to get started with their first prayer spaces, and readers will find lots of this in the book.
Probably the biggest misconception people have about running prayer spaces is that they’re really hard to run, either because it must be hard to persuade schools to want them in the first place, or because you have to be a special kind of person with lots of specialist resources to run one.
Like I said, these are misconceptions. It’s not hard to persuade schools to want prayer spaces. In fact, we frequently have school staff at our training events, or we receive emails from school staff, asking someone to come and run a prayer space for/with them. The education systems in Great Britain actually expects schools to offer spiritual learning in various ways (you can find out more about this on our websites), and prayer spaces are a really good way to authentically meet that expectation. And beyond this, most school staff are profoundly aware of the holistic needs that their pupils have, and they recognise that prayer spaces can help to meet some of those needs, even in small ways. And we have 17 years of stories to back this up.
And as for being special kinds of people with lots of specialist resources, that’s not true either. The best prayer space teams are made up of volunteers who simply love Jesus and love children and young people.
You need good listeners (more listening and less talking helps a lot). You need people who are welcoming and hospitable, comfortable, caring, and confident with children and young people. You need people who can serve schools and work to the professional standards required in a school setting, of course. And finally, I think every prayer space benefits from having a grandparent or two on the host team too.
Leading a prayer space – being on a prayer space team – is a big responsibility, but more than that, it is a privilege. It is a rare opportunity to witness the Holy Spirit at work in the lives of children and young people. In the book, I’ve included the story of Susie, a volunteer in one of the early prayer spaces, who wrote:
‘I was part of something so very special I actually didn’t want to leave… I would never in a million years have volunteered for this, but I’m glad I went. I found myself challenged, stretched and way out of my comfort zone.’
Jodie, another volunteer wrote, ‘I underestimated the power that these prayer spaces can have.’
Everyone should read this book. Any Christian who loves children and young people and wants to serve and support them. Any Christian who is concerned about the pastoral wellbeing or the spiritual lives of children and young people in their community. Parents and grandparents, church volunteers and church leaders, children’s workers and youth workers, school staff and chaplains, and not to be forgotten, children and young people themselves. Again, some of the most remarkable prayer spaces in schools have been hosted by younger leaders.
Feeling inspired? This was just the beginning. There is so much more to be said and stories to be told that you can read for yourself!
