Premier League Champions Manchester United have been doing their bit to help local children get to grips with healthy eating whilst improving their IT skills at the same time.
The project at Manchester United is part of the nationwide “Communicating for Success” programme, a partnership between BT and the Football Foundation, the UK’s largest sports charity. It uses the power of football to help tackle digital exclusion and improve IT and communication skills.
Representatives of both BT and The Football Foundation, including former England football star Martin Keown, who is an ambassador for the programme, joined the children at Manchester United’s Old Trafford Stadium as they showcased their work.
The club’s programme works with Year 5 and 6 pupils from three primary schools located in the Bucklow-St. Martins area of Trafford. The ward has a high proportion of social housing, including Carrington Moss and has pockets of extremely high deprivation in terms of income, employment, health, education and crime.
The children have been taking part in physical activities, including fitness training and football coaching, as well as learning about healthy eating and cooking. The children then used the information gathered during the physical and healthy eating activities to create content for a Digital Diary and Top Trumps style healthy eating card games, delivering key messages about food types and nutrition. The IT learning sessions involved both Manchester United Study Centre staff, a professional graphic designer and BT and university volunteer mentors.
The Digital Diary was completed using the IT facilities at the Study Centre and was converted and produced as a physical activity planner. This is a poster, giving the children an opportunity to work with a professional graphic designer and to learn design IT software. The blank template comes complete with progress stickers for the various activities, so the process can then be repeated after the project is complete, encouraging good habits and ongoing IT skills. The card game and the activity planner with stickers will be designed by the young people and then produced professionally and presented to all the participating schools and students.
Communicating for Success builds on the successful Playing for Success educational programme which sees the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and partners, including the Football Foundation and the Premier League, establish study support centres within sports clubs’ grounds and sporting venues across England. These Centres help young people, mainly aged 10-14, to improve their literacy, numeracy and ICT skills and raise educational attainment.
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