HandsOnScotland Toolkit Website - Updated

HandsOnScotland Toolkit Website "is an online resource for anybody working with or caring for children and young people. The website provides practical information and techniques on how to respond helpfully to children and young people's troubling behaviour and gives advice on how to help them flourish."

From a news item from them:

New section for parents and workers on how to help children flourish!

Learn how to: Build confidence; encourage gratitude; promote optimism; nurture good relationships; foster a sense of purpose; develop emotional
balance…and much more! Hands On Scotland is an established, well-used website which helps frontline workers make a difference to children and young people’s lives. It offers extensive practical information and ‘hands on’ techniques to respond helpfully to troubling behaviour. There are, on average, 11,000 visitors to the site every month.

Evaluation has shown that this website has increased workers’ understanding of troubling behaviours; their confidence; and the sense of feeling supported in their work:

‘Workers think ‘mental health’ and think they can’t do anything.  But the website refers to listening and just taking notice of things that are changing in the young person and it helps you realise you can do something’ (Project Worker)

Now the Hands On Scotland website has a new portal on how to help children and  young people flourish!

The new portal is a unique resource giving information, ideas and activities to help promote positive mental health, or flourishing, in all children and young people. It also aims to help prevent the difficulties described in the Troubling Behaviours section and to help improve workers’ and parents’ own mental health, thereby creating a flourishing community.

This new portal was designed for parents, carers and anyone working with infants, children and young people (for example: teachers, social workers, foster carers, health workers, school nurses, nursery nurses, etc). The flourishing portal contains 14 topics covering a wide range of issues including confidence, resilience, gratitude, good relationships, sense of purpose and emotional balance. The information is drawn from extensive literature in positive psychology, health promotion, education and public health.

Key messages from the new portal are: 

• Look after and build up your own mental health.
• Believe that each child has the potential and the right to flourish.
• Listen, to understand how each child really feels.
• Help each child discover their own unique worth.
• Connect well with each child and you will help them connect well with others.
• Encourage each child to enjoy the present moment.

There are also 33 activities designed for parents and workers to use with groups or individual children and young people to help them build good mental health. The site is continually evolving: each section has a feedback form, and comments from these forms will result in the website team adding or changing information and advice.

Initial feedback on the new portal has been very positive:

It is so refreshing to see information aimed at parents and workers with a focus on promoting positive mental health! (Social Worker)

If I were to put in all the things I liked about the site, it really would have been a book. (Fostering Services Practice Development Officer)

Lots of thoughtful and sensible advice…I like the way it is connected explicitly to the Curriculum for Excellence. (High school teacher)

Visit the website at www.handsonscotland.co.uk and help build flourishing young lives.