Supporting school communities

Public health warnings about alcohol abuse and poor diet do not always register, but parents listen when it’s their children delivering the message, says Jo Watson...

It was discouraging to find out that Blackburn with Darwen was awarded the title of a Heart Town because, even though it sounds pleasant, it actually means we live in an area of the UK that experiences high levels of heart-related illness and death.

However, jointly heading up the Blackburn Rovers Community Trust – the charitable arm of the Championship football club – with my colleague and fellow ex-teacher, Catherine Jermyn, has given me the rewarding experience of working with almost all the primary schools in the area to address just such issues.

Our most recent project has been one of the most gratifying because it responds to a real health issue that affects our community, giving us the opportunity to promote positive health messages. Through our Heart of the Game project, which works with the NHS and British Heart Foundation, we have been able to reach hundreds of local children and educate them about the serious issue of heart disease. Using Animate It, a programme from educational software publishers Kudlian, we gave opportunities to local Key Stage 2 pupils to create animated adverts about heart health, much in the style of the Change4Life videos.

Some may think a project like this begins and ends within the classroom, but we wanted this initiative to have a far reaching impact on the community and to encourage families with unhealthy lifestyles to make dramatic changes to avoid heart-related illnesses, based on the messages conveyed to them by their own children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

Blackburn with Darwen is a relatively small authority (approximately 150,000 residents) and most local people know somebody who is either suffering from poor heart health or has succumbed to a related illness. Our animation project shed light on how extensive the problem is. We gave our children the option to select a theme for their animations, such as diet, exercise, smoking etc. and were surprised at the large number of children who opted to tackle the more hardhitting issues such as alcoholism and drug abuse.

Even at the age of nine, a child can be incredibly aware of how the lifestyle of his or her family members can be harmful to their health. Creating these animations gave the children an outlet for some of their concerns, and a tool to communicate these worries to their parents. One particularly poignant animation depicted a tsunami of alcohol washing away a small town; a powerful metaphor for the destructive nature of excessive alcohol consumption. It’s frightening when you think about a nineyear old understanding the abstract concept of alcoholism, because it suggests that their understanding in part stems from witnessing the effects first hand.

We are very lucky to have the opportunity and resources necessary to apply for local and national funding to carry out these sorts of projects. Approximately one third of our authority population is under- 16, so this allows grass-roots organisations such as ours to work closely with schools to influence large scale positive social change. The animations created are powerful, not just because of the content, which has promoted actions such as eating 5-aday fruit and vegetables and getting 30 minutes of daily exercise, but because the messages are delivered to families by their own children. We continue to receive positive feedback from parents; they enjoy and are moved by the animations, and some have felt inspired to improve their lifestyle immediately.

Catherine and I have always believed in the role of alternative education. The Heart of the Game project is one of the most rewarding alternative education projects we have had the pleasure to deliver, and is cross curricular in the sense that it promotes the literacybased skills of persuasive writing, and ICT application with a bit of artistic flair. All participating children were engaged from the very beginning, and using the medium of animation was effective in helping them to make the serious issue of heart disease more accessible.