School Health Champions are children and young people identified by teaching staff in primary and secondary schools across South Tyneside with a passion for health.
School Health Champions
Who are the School Health Champions?
The aim of the School Health Champions is to allow young people in primary and secondary schools the opportunity to support their teachers to raise awareness of health topics in school, and take messages back to their families.
Champions are nominated by engaged schools and each receive a certificate and badge in recognition of their hard work.
The topics to be featured are chosen per term, and always in line with national campaigns. How schools focus on the topic is completely up to them, this could be with classroom displays, assemblies, posters, or however they wish to promote health awareness.
There is an award for the most engaged school per term, and the projects can be used as evidence towards the Healthy Schools Award.
Information for schools
Who are School Health Champions
What do they do?
School Health Champions will be responsible for supporting teaching staff to raise awareness of current campaigns or public health topics to their school community.
How does it work?
Healthy Schools leads within schools receive information and updates from the Public Health team regularly throughout the year.
Each term, schools will be offered a topic area on which to focus their School Health Champions.
How the schools choose to promote this topic is completely their choice. It could be in the form of assemblies, classroom displays, parent’s evenings, social media posts, activities, or any other creative ways the school wish to promote health and wellbeing.
For example, teachers might ask their School Health Champions to help to create a display around mental health in their classroom, or they might ask them to create a quiz for their families around physical activity.
Schools can send in their ideas to the Public Health Team, who will feature their excellent work in their ‘A Better U’ publications.
What are the benefits?
The School Health Champions project gives children and young people who are not yet old enough for (or are unable to commit to the demands of attending) the Young Health Ambassador programme the opportunity to hold a special role in promoting health and wellbeing to their peers and families.
Children and young people will be given a badge and certificate to thank them for their dedication, and show their status as a School Health Champion.
The school will be able to use the work created by the School Health Champions as evidence towards their Healthy School Award.
How can we get involved?
Please see Information for Schools for a printer-friendly version.
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Get involved
Find out more about becoming an 'a better u' champion.
Get involved