Empowering Youth: newfield school Students Inspire Young Minds

Last week saw a group of students from Newfield School in Sheffield deliver their social action projects to pupils from Woodlands Primary School on the themes of communication, friendship and the importance of wellbeing.

Thanks to funding from Westfield Health, 160 students from ten schools across Sheffield are being mentored by our world class sporting champions, building relationship skills, improving self-esteem and learning to stay focused, helping them to move forward with confidence. As part of the On Track to Achieve programme, students design and deliver a social action project in their local community on themes and topics that are important to them.

Under the guidance of badminton champion and athlete mentor Jenny Wallwork, the students worked in two separate groups to deliver a day of sessions at nearby Woodlands Primary School. The year eight students at Newfield delivered sessions to a group of year two pupils all around the themes of friendship and communication. They delivered an activity session around building friendships, getting the pupils to find out things out about one another and delivered specific activities aimed at getting them all talking to each other. All of the year two group got completely involved, even the inactive pupils who don’t normally get involved in PE, were up taking part and getting involved according to their teachers.

Later in the day, the year ten group delivered their sessions to a group of year four students, all around the importance of wellbeing. As you can see from the pictures below, the weather was terrible and halfway through they had to head inside as the rain was just too much. The group coped brilliantly though and had to adapt for the second half by delivering the session indoors, which they did by getting the group to learn about food types using healthy eating charts, holding wellbeing quizzes and using wellbeing wordsearches.

Athlete mentor Jenny Wallwork said after the event:

“I am buzzing with how well they all did. They were such a quiet group to start with, but they have come such a long way over the last few months and today they were just absolutely incredible, adapting to all the challenges and delivering brilliant sessions to the pupils at Woodlands.”

The teachers at Woodlands all remarked on how good the students were. Many of the pupils were more engaged and overall it was apparently better than when they have paid for external organisations to come in and deliver sessions previously! Jenny has already started mentoring a second group of students at Newfield and the teachers at Woodlands are really keen to have them come and deliver again to their pupils if possible.

We’re very grateful for the support from Westfield Health. Our three year partnership with them is allowing us to support over 200 young people a year in Sheffield through both school based and community programmes to develop confidence, resilience and self esteem alongside improving their physical and mental wellbeing.