• eduu.school and Kooth partner to provide critical mental health education, support and services to children
  • The online learning platform offers extensive mental health support through an integrated curriculum

London, 19 February 2021 – Online mental wellbeing service Kooth and online learning platform eduu.school, in partnership with Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust, GLUU and Hodder Education Group, today announced a co-curated mental health-focused curriculum. The ground-breaking partnership will provide students using eduu.school with direct access to support via Kooth.com, including an anonymous self-referral platform, magazines, forums, activity centres and text-based, professional counselling. 

The new partnership integrates mental health support into the digital curriculum, ensuring children are supported at all levels through their educational development. Mental health resources and support mechanisms provided by Kooth will be blended into the eduu.school digital curriculum for key stages three and four, with over 1,600 hours of resources for each key stage.

The integration aims to make the support and resources a part of the everyday learning experience, destigmatising mental wellbeing. The pandemic has exacerbated mental health problems for many young people. Kooth’s January data* indicates a bleak image: 39 percent of young people are presenting with anxiety and 21 percent are self-harming, with another 21 percent experiencing suicidal thoughts, an increase of 40 percent and 47 percent on the same week last year, respectively. 

Sir Mark Grundy, CEO, Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust and eduu.school partner said: “There has never been a more urgent need to adjust our curriculum and pedagogies to reflect the emerging landscape resulting from COVID-19 and DfE remote learning guidelines. The education system needs to respond quickly but thoughtfully to help our children by evolving a new model which places equal emphasis on wellbeing and attainment.” 

Tim Barker, CEO, Kooth said: “At Kooth, we are focused on delivering effective, personalised mental health care for everyone. Greater integration of mental health into the curriculum will prompt discussions, reduce stigma and ensure that students know that there is help available if they need it. At a time when more students are struggling than ever before, we believe that our collaboration with eduu.school is an important step toward providing the additional support that they deserve.”

The co-curated mental health and wellbeing programme will include integrations with Office365, Google Classroom and other popular platforms, and offer options for both synchronous and asynchronous learning and assessment. The content has been designed to meet Ofsted requirements for remote learning and DfE remote learning guidelines, and it will be accessible to students whether they are learning from home or attending school in-person.

-ENDS-

Notes to the editor:

*Data measured 17th January 2021.

eduu.school is a flexible online learning platform for key stages 1-4, with a unique approach to wellbeing. The eduu.school pilot was accessed by nearly 2000 students across 14 schools (including a Special School) and three local authorities, doubling our pilot ambitions. We had requests to support over 4000 students. We have delivered over 900 hours of independent learning resources; and students enjoyed working with the school’s resources through the summer, completing over 400 assignments.

For more information:

Hodder Education Group: Victoria Goodall, Victoria.goodall@hoddereducation.co.uk 

Kooth plc: Natalia Sloam, nsloam@kooth.com

Schools can register their interest at: www.hoddereducation.co.uk/eduuschool

About the partners

About Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust

Sir Mark Grundy and his team at Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust have pioneered technology, analytics and digital pedagogies for 20 years. The Trust delivered over 2000 live, interactive lessons and recorded over 300,000 teacher/student interactions within the first month of school closures owing to COVID. Their know-how, blended curriculum content, analytics capability and teacher-training expertise is now being made available for MATs and schools, UK and internationally. www.shirelandcat.org.uk

About GLUU 

GLUU creates industry and school partnerships to blend the best teaching knowledge with innovative technologies. These place children at the very heart of the education experience no matter whether self or tutored learning, with a parent, guardian, mentor, or in the classroom with a teacher. www.gluu.tech 

The Nesta-funded eduu.school site, with additional information, can be found here: 

https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/eduuschool/

About Kooth

We are the UK’s leading online mental health platform. Our mission is to provide accessible and safe spaces for everyone to achieve better mental health. Our online platform is clinically robust and accredited to provide a range of therapeutic support and interventions. All our services are predicated on easy access to make early intervention and prevention a reality.

Our services are:

Kooth: for children and young persons

Qwell: for adults

Kooth work: for organisations

Kooth is commissioned in 77percent of the NHS’s clinical commissioning group areas across the country. It is a fully safeguarded and pre-moderated community with a library of peer and professional created content, alongside access to experienced online counsellors. There are no thresholds for support and no waiting lists. Currently, Kooth sees over 3,500 logins a day. 

Qwell operates across distinct locations and serves specific cohorts, including parents, teachers, victims of crime and those who have suffered from or continue to experience domestic violence. It is also offered as a benefit by a number of corporate organisations delivering anonymous digital mental health support services to employees.

Kooth Work – a corporate service, aimed specifically at employers to support the wellbeing of their employees, providing confidential and anonymous access to a wellbeing community, counselling, content and self-help tools. Kooth Work provides valuable, anonymous insights into the wellbeing of the workforce so that employers can identify specific areas of improvement for their wellbeing strategy.

 

About Hodder Education Group

Hodder Education Group is one of the UK’s largest educational publishers and has been working with schools and colleges, expert authors and awarding organisations for many years to create quality print and digital resources that support students and teachers across Primary, Secondary and Further Education, within the UK and around the world. Hodder Education Group is part of Hachette UK, one of the largest and most diverse publishing groups in the world, including leading educational publishers in France and Spain. HEG has specialist imprints that provide focus and support for teachers and learners in the UK and worldwide: 

  • Rising Stars creates an award-winning range of books, teaching material and digital resources that support primary teachers and learners. They always work with expert authors and advisors to ensure their resources provide exactly what is needed in school across all areas of the primary curriculum. www.risingstars-uk.com
  • RS Assessment from Hodder Education is the market leader in delivering assessments that accurately track progress, support teacher judgements and inform future teaching and learning. They specialise in standardised assessments such as the PiRA and PuMA tests, assessments to support SEN and Wellbeing as well as lighter-touch check-in tests. https://www.risingstars-uk.com/rs-assessment
  • Hodder Education provides print and digital resources for over 30 subjects, covering teaching, learning, CPD and revision at KS3 to 5, and on into Further Education. They also provide CPD training and student revision events to help equip everyone with the skills they need to progress and succeed. www.hoddereducation.co.uk

About Hachette UK:

Our mission at Hachette UK is to make it easy for everyone, everywhere to unlock new worlds of ideas, learning, entertainment and opportunity. 

We are one of the UK’s largest publishing groups, with 10 autonomous publishing divisions and over 50 imprints with a rich and diverse history. We are also the market leader in e-books and publish a range of bestsellers in audio format, the fastest growing part of our business. 

We publish thousands of new books across the group every year and our authors include Martina Cole, Michael Connelly, John Grisham, Stephen King, Stieg Larsson, Nelson Mandela, Stephenie Meyer, Ian Rankin, J.K. Rowling and Malala Yousafzai.

Our award-winning adult publishing divisions are Little, Brown, Orion, John Murray Press, Hodder & Stoughton, Headline, Quercus, Bookouture and Octopus. Hachette Children’s Group publishes a diverse range of books for children of all ages and Hodder Education is a market leader in resources for both primary and secondary schools. 

We have offices around the UK, including our headquarters in London and the Hely Hutchinson Centre (HHC) for distribution in Didcot. We have subsidiaries in several other regions, including Australia, India, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jamaica and New Zealand.