Register your school and start planning
Congratulations, you've just made your first SmallSteps4Life...
First register your school on the site so you can join the SmallSteps4Life family and start your journey.
Next, you will need to begin planning how SmallSteps4Life will work in your school. Based on our work with schools so far we're able to provide some tips on how you can do this. The schools found these worked well, but of course you can adapt them to your school's need.
We recommend you allocate at least 4-6 weeks for the planning process, but it's possible to do it quicker, depending on your capacity.
- Get senior management support to run SmallSteps4Life in your school.
- Identify a lead for your school who is responsible for making sure it happens, if it isn't you. In the long run you may want to identify young people to lead the way!
- Set up a SmallSteps4Life planning group that can help you make it happen. You might want to use or adapt an existing group. One of the key principles of SmallSteps4Life is student participation, so inviting students onto the planning group is an ideal way to get them involved from the start. For example, recruit SmallSteps4Life champions through your school councils or equivalent.
- Talk to the entire school staff team (including teaching and support staff) about the programme and gather their ideas on how it could work. You could do this at a staff meeting or as part of INSET training.
With your SmallSteps4Life planning group and wider staff team identify how you can introduce SmallSteps4Life into your school. Schools we've worked with have tackled this differently with some delivering it through teaching time. Primary schools incorporated time at the beginning and end of every teaching day to introduce and run SmallSteps4Life activities. Secondary schools incorporated teaching on health and well-being issues into the citizenship curriculum, for example looking at food and drink advertising. Another approach, involved a health day where students explored the full range of health and well-being issues before choosing their challenges.
Then, think about wider whole school activities (assemblies, before and after school clubs) that you can run throughout the duration of the 4-week health challenge to encourage people to do the challenge together and to help maintain momentum.
Step 2: Choose a challenge >