Childnet’s Thrive Online project aims to empower young people with Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND) to build happy and healthy online relationships. In this project Childnet are developing toolkits for parents and educators of young people with SEND, as well as new learning modules for young people with SEND whose schools are subscribed to the Digital Leaders Programme. These resources and modules will explore the topics of:
- Digital Wellbeing
- Healthy Relationships
- Online Pornography
To find out more about Thrive Online and the aims of this project take a look at our project launch blogpost here.
Opportunities for educators, parents and carers, and pupils to get involved
We are working directly with educators, parents, carers, and other organisations who work in this area to inform the Thrive Online resources and have been hearing about the positive impacts of the online world as well as the challenges that young people with SEND face online.
We would like to hear opinions and thoughts from educators, parents and carers, as well as directly from young people with SEND throughout this project. One of our key aims is to ensure that youth voice and young people’s online experiences inform these important resources.
We have a few ways that we would like to invite school communities to get involved in the Thrive Online project this term:
Educators and support staff
- We invite you to complete our educators survey. This survey should take 15-30 minutes to complete. Please also share this survey with your network of school staff who work with SEND pupils.
- By taking part in SEND educator and support staff focus groups. To find out more about these please email education@childnet.com
Parents and carers
- We are looking at running parent and carer focus groups. To find out more about these please email education@childnet.com
- We invite you to complete our parent and carer survey.
Young people with SEND
We are working in a number of ways to involve young people in our project, including:
- Pupil focus groups. We are open to different ways of running pupil focus groups. Whether you would prefer the Childnet team to lead an online focus group or to develop an activity for a focus group led by school staff, please get in touch to discuss the ways in which we could hear directly from your pupils.
- Pupil surveys. We can also develop a tailor-made survey for a group of your pupils to complete online or on paper.
Note that we will share information sheets for parents and carers and will require consent forms for all young people taking part in our project research.
Piloting the resources in the autumn term
We are looking for schools who would like to pilot the educator resources in school in the autumn term as well as piloting the parent resources with their parent and carer community.
We are also looking for SEND schools subscribed to the Digital Leaders Programme to pilot the new Digital Leaders modules. If your school is not yet subscribed to the Digital Leaders Programme, you can enrol now to then be able to take part in the piloting of these new modules. Find out more about the Digital Leaders Programme here.
If you would like to take up any of these opportunities or find out more information about working with Childnet throughout Thrive Online, please get in touch at education@childnet.com
