Delivering subject content through nine life themes
At-risk young people who took part in a programme that used football as a vehicle for intensive mentoring experienced a significant improvement in their wellbeing, a new report says. The mentoring programme, which provided a trusted adult for more than 2,000 young people in secondary schools, resulted in wellbeing benefits estimated to be worth millions of pounds. We face a mental health crisis affecting people of every age group, young and old. This report is evidence of the value of spending time – and money – on building and maintaining strong relationships, which are key not just to our wellbeing and life chances as individuals but also to the cohesion of families and communities. We need to be investing in relationships.
The report – Investing in trusted relationships – was written by Pro Bono Economics (PBE). It evaluates the impact of a programme by the charity Football Beyond Borders (FBB) to provide a trusted adult for young people who may not otherwise have one in their life.
The programme provides support within secondary schools, particularly targeted towards students at risk of exclusion, such as those with poor behaviour records, who have suffered adverse childhood experiences or who have special educational needs. It uses sport to build trust, combining this with one-to-one mentoring and group work to help develop a young person’s socio-emotional awareness.
FBB defines a trusted adult as someone “chosen by the young person as a safe figure that listens without judgement, agenda or expectation, with the sole purpose of supporting and encouraging positivity within a young person’s life”.
The report’s authors found that:
The Football Beyond Borders programme demonstrates how new ideas and creative approaches can help to tackle the current crisis in children’s wellbeing, offering good value for money for society.
Jon Franklin, Chief economist, Pro Bono Economics
FBB is a charity that works with young people from areas of socio-economic disadvantage who are passionate about football but disengaged at school, to help them finish school with the skills and grades to make a successful transition into adulthood. The report estimates that up to 800,000 children in the UK may lack the support of a trusted adult at school today. FBB says that it is committed to “expanding its impact and ensuring every young person has a trusted adult at school”.
Andrew Ketteringham, the chair of trustees of the charity Relate, summed up the importance of strong, lasting relationships in the foreword to Relate’s document What’s love got to do with it? 14 ideas for putting relationships at the heart of policy.
Relationships matter. Good quality relationships with partners, families, friends and wider social networks provide meaning to our lives and are central to our identity. But they also hold the keys to our health and wellbeing; to our ability to engage in and progress in education and at work, to our long-term life chances and to instilling resilience in individuals. They are also the cornerstone of a thriving economy and society.
Andrew Ketteringham, Chair of trustees, Relate
The health of our relationships is a long-term issue. The breakdown of relationships – in our personal and working lives – is a major cause of stress, anxiety and mental ill-health, all of which are on a seemingly inexorable rise. Modern living, it appears, is driving people apart. Yet quality of relationships is at the heart of human existence.
We need to prioritise investing in building and maintaining good relationships and address the difficulties in forming positive personal and workplace relationships in a rapidly changing world.
Failure to do so, said the Mental Health Foundation in a 2022 report called Relationships in the 21st century: The forgotten foundation of mental health and wellbeing, is “equivalent to turning a blind eye to the impact of smoking and obesity on our health and wellbeing.”
We need a sea change in thinking. Instinctively, we recognise that relationships are important. However, for many of us, our approach to building and maintaining relationships is passive – it is something we do subconsciously and without deliberate effort. We often overlook that it requires an investment of time to maintain good relationships. In parallel, when it comes to keeping physically well, we recognise that exercise and eating well require commitment and dedication – until good habits become second nature. We need to adopt a similar approach to building and maintaining good relationships.
from the Mental Health Foundation report Relationships in the 21st century
A key Life-Based Learning (LBL) principle is that how we teach children and what we teach them are both essential to making a difference in the long term. The Relationships learning theme aims to equip children with key relationship-building skills as they begin to construct an ever-expanding web of relationships at home, in school and in the wider world, including – ultimately – the workplace.
That is why Relationships is one of nine LBL themes. It focuses on pre-teenage children learning how to form fulfilling, empathetic and lasting relationships based on dignity and respect. Children need to be learning about the basic building blocks of healthy relationships – awareness of body language and other non-verbal forms of communication; understanding the potential impact of the words we utter and the way we say them; the universal moral imperative to treat others fairly – in their formative years when they are most open to learning.
Image at the head of this article by Golden Haven Memorial Park from Pixabay.
