Thousands of children set to benefit from new school mental health and wellbeing programme

Thousands of secondary school children are set to benefit from an innovative mental health and wellbeing programme commissioned by Norfolk County Council.

The Rise Up early intervention programme is set to be delivered to more than 60 schools and academies across the county by award-winning Norwich-based company Future Action, which specialises in transforming young people's wellbeing through whole-school early intervention teacher training courses.

The county council has used funding from a Wellbeing in Education grant from the Government's Department for Education to commission the programme.

Cllr John Fisher, cabinet member for Children's Services, said: "We've been delighted with the response from Norfolk's secondary academies and special schools, which have been very keen to take part in this programme to help their staff improve their range of early intervention skills.

"Mental health and wellbeing is what young people across the county have been consistently highlighting to us as the issue they are most concerned about - they've made this clear after hundreds voted it their top priority in the recent Make Your Mark ballot during the Norfolk Youth Parliament elections.

"More consistently providing early intervention strategies and learning, and identifying those young people who need help earlier, are both key to improving support and we're confident this programme will help to deliver these aims."

Neil Moggan, founder of Future Action and director of sport, health and RSHE at City Academy, said: "We are delighted to create this partnership with the council and Norfolk's schools and academies to improve support for the mental wellbeing of young people.

"This programme has already had significant impact in a number of schools, and we are thrilled that we can now extend this offer further to more schools so we can help many more young people now and long after they have left education."

The programme has proven its success over the last year after being used by teachers at City Academy in Norwich and Hethersett Academy.

Rise Up is a nine-step step online teacher training programme which upskills teachers and provides them with a comprehensive set of editable resources to use in PE sessions and Relationship, Health and Sex Education (RHSE) classes to reduce students' anxiety and build their confidence. It can be used for all year groups and offers a toolbox of self-care strategies and physical activities to support young people to develop the skills to manage their mental wellbeing.

After teachers have engaged with the training, they can tailor the programme to a particular class or school need. Students can be offered four categories of physical activities to benefit their mental wellbeing such as repetitive exercises, inclusive team sports, stress busters, and energisers alongside strategies to develop mindfulness, confidence building, self-kindness, using worries as a positive, and looking at healthy and unhealthy habits

The programme has two aims. The first is to provide all young people with a range of self-care strategies to protect and build their mental wellbeing. The second is to identify individual young people struggling with their mental health and direct them to the specialist support they need.