Zippy, Apple and Passport arrive in Oldham

We are delighted to be working in partnership with Oldham Council and Oldham Opportunity Area in the UK to offer our Skills for Life Programmes to primary schools in the region.

Oldham Council are passionate about embedding The Whole School Approach to Emotional Health and Mental Wellbeing into their schools and chose our programmes to help equip their children with a range of coping skills as part of their Whole School Approach to building happy and resilient children.

Aimee Thomas, Mental Wellbeing Advisor, explained; “We know that children are now facing much more complex issues in relation to their mental wellbeing, but the big question on everybody’s lips – how do they cope with this? Of course, it would be easy to run a few assemblies on coping strategies but would children forget half of them before playtime? Probably! We knew that in order to help support children, the skills needed to be developed at a pace so that children can digest and fully understand.  Let’s face it, you wouldn’t teach maths in an assembly and never go back to it again! It’s exactly the same with social and emotional learning programmes.”

To date we have run 8 training workshops in Oldham, training 136 teachers from 54 schools in Zippy’s Friends, Apples Friends and as of this month, Passport. Teachers are fully committed to embedding the programmes in their schools and are already noticing that the skills learnt are being demonstrated in a range of different ways. To hear what teachers think about our programmes, watch their short video.

Aimee told us that she believes, “every child should have access to Apple and Zippy – the skills learnt are skills they’ll carry with them throughout their lives. Partnership for Children, thank you for collaborative working! Your programmes are making a real difference to the children of Oldham”.