Back to school with ‘Making Health Work’

Remember when our Making Health Work team became Dragons for a day? Together with the Street League Academy we have been supporting a group of 16-25 year olds, who are all NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), to develop a Health Action Project.

And last month, they successfully delivered that project: a Get Active sports and activities day at a local school.

The video we took back in November shows the group, who had split into teams calling themselves “Dream Team” and “Get Active”, presenting their Health Action Project ideas to our Dragons so that they could receive funding.

The Get Active team won but, once they’d received the grant, the whole group worked together to develop the project, a sports day for 11-12 year olds at Hodge Hill College.

Nearly 240 year 7s took part in the sports day activities, which included sports like table tennis, basketball and football, as well as activities involving healthy eating and nutrition, like a “guess the smoothie” game. Gateway’s Health Trainers got in on the act, too, talking to the children about fats and sugars, and there was a snack bar serving healthy refreshments, like fruit. At the end, all the children received medals for taking part.

Feedback from the children who took part shows that they enjoyed the chance to get active and take part in a variety of games. Some of them even enjoyed the healthy snacks!

And the feedback from the young people who ran the activity day, below, shows that they have learnt a lot from developing the project. Both the Street League Academy and The Making Health Work programme (which is funded by the Big Lottery and delivered by Gateway in partnership with the Foyer Federation) are all about helping young people spread healthy messages, and linking this to employability. So we’re pleased to hear that the project has helped them to gain confidence and independence as well as developing practical skills like team work, communication, research and planning.

I thought it would have been a challenge, I have never done anything like this before. I was able to lead sessions alone.

I enjoyed the responsibility of working with children.

This has made me realise that I would like to work in a school as a PE teacher.

It gave me more confidence […] I’m more of a leader.

It has helped me realise that I can go forward and do something like this as a future career option so I will be looking into opportunities to work with young people in sport.

We’ve really enjoyed working with Street League and can’t wait to work with them on another exciting Health Action Project. We’ll be bringing news of that and other Health Action Projects on this blog, so watch this space!