Learning for Life… What’s Next?
We’ve been giving lots of well-deserved love to Teach Me Too recently, as we released the first series in over three years.
But don’t worry, Learning for Life is still at the forefront of our minds! Building out the RSE offer is a key goal at Learn and Thrive for 2025, so let’s talk about it.
What’s in the works for 2025…
Respectful Relationships
Our first series coming up is the Respectful Relationships series which we are launching with our friends at Down’s Syndrome Scotland. This has been in the works for a while, and has been directly informed by the experiences of the members, employees, and volunteers at DS Scotland, so we know you will love it to. This series will cover topics which have been sought after for a while, ranging all the way from respectful use of social media to consent, obsession, and break ups.
As always with our Learning for Life content, we have structured this on the curriculum, but we’ve added topics and activities that we feel our learners with Down’s syndrome and learning difficulties would benefit from. This includes discussions around alignment of values and interests which might form the basis of a romantic relationship, right to individual words and phrases that can help with asking somebody to be your boyfriend/girlfriend/partner.
Online Safety
The second series we are working on is all about online safety, made with iVengers and former trustee Sophie Evitts, Deputy Headteacher of a SEND school. Now that technology, social media, and the internet is a key part of our community’s daily lives, we know lots of parent carers, and indeed educators, are in desperate need of ways to effectively teach them to be safe online.
Still in it’s early planning stages, we would always welcome input from our users on things you’d like to see in this series. Let us know by filling in this form.
Joe from Inclusive Sport who runs sessions in the ‘How To… Be Healthy’ exercise series.
How To… Preparing Healthy Meals
We’re finally able to further develop our ‘How To…’ videos, with a brand new set on eating. This will teach key stills for making healthy, balanced meals, including things like knife skills, to provide this integral life skill to all our learners.
There’s also much more we’d like to add into our plans for 2025, but without funding we can’t keep doing what we do. Please consider supporting us and helping us develop further free, specialist content for individuals with Down’s syndrome and learning disabilities.
When do we start the secondary curriculum?
It’s important to us that we lay down all the foundational skills from the primary curriculum in a way that is accessible to older leaners, first. To teach the secondary curriculum our learners need a secure base in the basics: for example, learners need an understanding of what private means before discussing sexual feelings and sexual acts.
What’s more, some of the concepts in the secondary curriculum are complicated and challenging, not only to understand but also to digest - they dig much deeper and dive explicitly into some of the exploitation that underlines a lot of our earlier teaching. For example, by teaching about public and private body parts, we are empowering learners to understand that when someone who shouldn’t touch them in these places does so, that this is wrong. In the secondary curriculum, this is described much more explicitly as sexual assault/harrassment/violence.
We want to make sure we handle these topics carefully, effectively, and with our learners at the heart, so that we can teach these tough, necessary concepts in an accessible and useful way.
So while we can’t give you a date right now, we can say the planning is in place and we are seeking the right partners to work with to make sure we get this right!
There’s more going on behind the scenes
Not only are we working hard to increase the series in the project, but there’s so much more going on behind the scenes. We’ve got some key goals we’d like to achieve with Learning for Life, to bring our trusted project to more young people across the UK (and the world!).
1. We are partnering with more local groups than ever
The Learning for Life project has been built to be used at home, schools, and in support groups. And as many of our users will know, support groups across the UK vary massively in what they can and do offer, based on funding, capacity, and so much more. We know that in years gone by so many of these groups, often parent-led, have been creating their own curriculum to improve social skills, understanding of the world around us, and more. But with limited time and resources, we want more local groups to be able to take Learning for Life and use it in their sessions, saving time in creating their own curriculum, and being confident in the knowledge that the content they are teaching is quality, specialist, and personalisable.
2. We’re getting more young people involved in our filming
In our Respectful Relationships series, we’re lucky enough to have some conversational elements, where we hear from young people directly about their experiences. This is beneficial in so many ways:
Life Skills Unfiltered Poster - Podcast by Learn and Thrive.
Our stars get work experience working in front of a camera
Those watching the videos are represented on screen
The conversations give guidance to parent carers and educators on how to develop the ideas in their own teaching sessions
3. We’re developing our podcast
It’s not all about us on Life Skills Unfiltered, we’re taking the core principle of Learning for Life - providing strategies for real life - and applying it to a range of different topics. We’re bringing together parent carers, experts, charity leaders, and more to discuss some of the gritty challenges our community faces and coming up with real, usable solutions. Showing that you are not alone, and that there are systems out there that can support you and your learner(s).
So, 2025 is off to an incredible start! We are incredibly excited to see where it takes us and all of our users, and, as always, we’re putting our learners at the heart of what we do.