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Healthy Schools East Midlands 
HEALTHY SCHOOLS EAST MIDLANDS
The East Midlands is achieving rapid success in meeting the government’s Healthy Schools target. Eighty-eight per cent of the region’s 2,113 schools are engaged with Healthy Schools and 40 per cent had reached the status by July 2007. By the start of 2008 it is expected that 55 per cent will be accredited, according to Janet Flett, Regional Co-ordinator for the East Midlands National Healthy Schools project.
The key to the strategy is adopting priorities that reflect key local concerns. Derbyshire schools, for example, have been working with the arts and are encouraging children to grow, crop and cook their own food as part of the Year of Food and Farming launched by Prince Charles at Highgrove in September 2007. Nottinghamshire has been using theatre in education to promote the healthy-schools message and tackle particular issues such as smoking, teenage pregnancy and binge drinking. Flett says: “People are all doing interesting things to meet the needs of Healthy Schools locally. And I think that is the crux of the programme — bringing people together creates strength and focus”.
East Midlands holds bi-monthly meetings at the government offices in Nottingham for what Flett calls the ‘field force’. These are representatives from local authorities across the region who meet to consider the direction of Healthy Schools and to discuss ways of better co-ordinating and pooling efforts and funding to best effect.
Some remarkable successes have been seen in 2007. Derby city has just been awarded Beacon status as a local authority on the basis of its Healthy Schools Programme. So what are the priorities? First of all food and nutrition come high on the region’s agenda. Says Flett: “ What we are doing ties in very closely with national concerns over childhood obesity. This year we will be delivering a raft of projects all aimed at giving cookery and nutrition a higher profile including What’s Cooking?, Let’s Get Cooking and Food for Life.
Selecting from a wide range of cookery-related projects each carrying its own funding stream allows the regional healthy-school’s co-ordinator to target resources where they will be most effective. Flett says: “The Healthy Schools project is a route to selecting schools where these projects will make the most impact. We add value to make it work”.
The other part of the equation in tackling obesity is exercise. East Midlands puts a strong emphasis on walk-to-school clubs and increasing physical activity. The region’s school nursing service has just started a programme of weighing and measuring children to establish baseline figures for evaluating whether its policies on improving physical activity are working.
Training is at the heart of this policy, and East Midlands Healthy Schools has allocated funding for a physical activity toolkit. The material supplements a programme of training playground supervisors in leading games and setting up pre-school ‘Wake-up and Shake-up’ clubs. East Midlands is also training playground buddies.
Teacher training is not neglected and the East Midlands has a project in hand to train more teachers in Personal Social and Health Education (PSHE) to meet a government target. So far 95 teachers in the region have been trained. Working in partnership with the Drugs and Alcohol Treatment Service (DATS), the East Midlands offers teachers the opportunity to train as drugs counsellors, thus adding to their pastoral care portfolio.
Improvements in children’s emotional health and well-being will be improved by the region’s new policy of multi-agency working. Schools together with emotional and behavioural support services and youth mental-health workers from the region’s primary-care trusts are working together on sharing information and making early interventions. Flett says: “We want to improve the service we offer to young people who are emotionally disturbed. Early intervention and nipping problems in the bud must be part of the healthy-school’s jigsaw. Our success is down to partnership working”.
Flett also believes strongly in consulting with the children themselves. Healthy Schools works closely with schools councils to approve new schemes and assess progress. Flett explains: “In the past too many children have felt disengaged. Healthy Schools is a way of keeping them happy, engaged and satisfied that their views are being acted on”.
National Healthy Schools Programme:
Regional Co-ordinator
Name Janet Flett
Emailjanet.flett@lincolnshire.gov.uk
Telephone 01522 550530
Local Co-ordinators
City of Derby (East Midlands)
Name Louise Bates
Email louise.bates@derby.gov.uk
City of Nottingham (East Midlands)
Name Chris Wallbanks
Email chris.wallbanks@collegest.org.uk
Telephone 0115 9476202
Derbyshire (East Midlands)
Name Marianne Rawson
Email marianne.rawson@derbyshirecountypct.nhs.uk
Telephone 01246 514345
Leicester City (East Midlands)
Name John Whitby
Email john.whitby@leicestercitypct.nhs.uk
Telephone 0116 2954112
Leicestershire (East Midlands)
Name Jane Roberts
Email jbroberts@leics.gov.uk
Telephone 01530 278125
Lincolnshire (East Midlands)
Name Janet Flett
Email janet.flett@healthyschools.gov.uk
Telephone 01522 550530
Northamptonshire (East Midlands)
Name Jane Valentino
Email jane.valentino@northants.nhs.uk
Telephone 01604 615341
Nottinghamshire (East Midlands)
Name helene denness
Email helene.denness@nottinghamshirecounty-tpct.nhs.uk
Telephone 01623 414114
Rutland (East Midlands)
Name Susan Denton
Email sdenton@rutland.gov.uk |
