Mental Wellbeing
The Mental Wellbeing components cover:
- Understanding mental wellbeing: mental wellbeing is a normal part of daily life, that it is common for people to experience mental ill health. How to recognise the early signs of mental wellbeing concerns.
- Identifying emotions: the ability to recognise and use vocabulary about a wide array of emotions when talking about one's own and others’ feelings.
- The impact of behaviour choices: how to evaluate when something has a positive or negative impact on one's own or others’ mental health.
- Bullying behaviours: bullying behaviours have a negative and often lasting impact on mental wellbeing.
- Seeking support: where and how to seek support, including who in the school someone should speak to if they are worried about their own or someone else’s mental wellbeing.
- Personalised coping strategies: how to develop and maintain positive mental wellbeing, including the importance of rest, physical exercise and connections with social networks.
Online Safety
The core training has a very strong focus on internet safety throughout the day and is interwoven throughout 4 of the core one hour training sessions: “The Impact of Our Behaviours”; “Digital Resilience’’; “Healthy Relationships and Self-Care” (which specifically concerns coping strategies in a digital context) and “Building Our Future Selves’ (where school based pupil-led interventions are encouraged, with a focus on online safety projects as a priority).
A quiz on the baseline facts regarding online safety kicks things off and how young people should use the internet is encouraged for discussion throughout the day. The Online Safety dimension of the day covers:
- Cyberbullying: how online bullying behaviour occurs on all types of platforms (social media and gaming), including types that are classified as illegal. Awareness of the Online Safety Act.
- Appropriate use: understanding the purpose of how and why we use social media and online platforms to communicate with others and the social impact this has on our self-esteem, body image and development of healthy relationships, including the use of AI imagery.
- Age restrictions: knowledge about the age any young person is permitted to access certain platforms, gaming sites, or financial services.
- Support tools: where and how online support can be accessed, what types of support are available and how to operate personal privacy on your accounts.
- Privacy and data protection: learning about what information is shared online and its validity, how to maintain your privacy and personal information and who are appropriate contacts to connect with.
A Long Term and Flexible Approach
The YouthShoots training concept is built upon a notional 7 year, repeating, model, where YouthShoots starts the resilience training of pupils in Year 4 and then continues it in Years 6, 8 and 10 (our seedlings, saplings, buds and sprouts). YouthShoots has therefore developed 4 core training days aimed at these stages of pupils in their school life. These training days, when consecutively delivered over the school life of the pupil, provide mutually reinforcing resilience training, supporting them throughout their school life and focusing on the particular challenges as they grow. However, each of the 4 versions of core training is also designed to exist independently, and autonomously, and provide age and experience appropriate resilience training for the target year group as a “one-off” and so any of the 4 training days can be utilised at any time by schools to provide maximum impact, depending upon the school’s particular need. This provides maximum flexibility for schools when designing the best model with YouthShoots.
Delivery Models
Core Training
Whole Year Group Assembly
Resilience Reps
This model provides direct learning to participants for single schools for up to 120 pupils per training day.
Resilience Reps
Whole Year Group Assembly
Resilience Reps
Youth Shoots’ own version of the peer2peer delivery model is the “Resilience Rep”. We have found that this is an excellent model to reach as many pupils as possible for the lowest cost.
Whole Year Group Assembly
Whole Year Group Assembly
Whole Year Group Assembly
Introductory awareness sessions on specific topics can be delivered to whole year groups or assemblies.
Propagation Packs
YouthShoots provides a bespoke package of resources and action plans for schools and pupils to use in facilitating their learning from the training back in their school settings for example:
(i) a PowerPoint Presentation for pupils who have attended the course to present important elements of the Core Training Day to their peers;
(ii) activity plans for teachers (on coping strategies) and/or pupils (on online safety session) to pass on, reinforce and develop the principles of the training day;
(iii) support for pupil-led action plans created during the training, such as Resilience Reps leading poster-making featuring key messages from the training day.
Legislation, Curriculum and Policy Alignment
DfE Senior Mental Health Leads and PHE’s Core Principles
YouthShoots engagement is designed to assist and support Senior Mental Health Leads as they deliver a whole school approach to enhancing resilience and wellbeing.
Core Training also embeds and advances 3 of the 8 Core Principles of Public Health England’s current “Promoting Children and Young People’s Emotional Health and Wellbeing” policy: (1) curriculum teaching and learning to promote resilience and support social and emotional learning (2) ethos and environment that promotes respect and values diversity (3) enabling student voice to influence decisions.
RSE Curriculum
Our Core training is specifically designed to align with and complement the current Relationships and Sex Education statutory guidance that all schools must deliver in the areas of “Internet Safety & Harms” and “Mental Wellbeing”.
Online Safety Act 2023 and Ofcom Regulation
YouthShoots monitors the evolution of the implementation of the protections under the Online Safety Act 2023 as guidance and codes of practice are consulted upon and published by Ofcom, the online safety regulator, to inform the core training and its evaluation of the impact of the training.
This includes the recent “A Positive Vision for Media Literacy: Ofcom’s Three-Year Media Literacy Strategy” (7th October 2024) and Ofcom’s “Evaluation Toolkit: Outcomes, Indicators and Surveys Questions Bank” (9 September 2024).