The Background to Wot Wud U Do starts in 2011, as a university project.  We set out to focus on creativity to engage and educate young people to make better life choices, based on our experiences of making very bad choices. In the early days, a prototype was built after securing a small pot of money through the universities business help programme, and led to the creation of a core engagement tool, the interactive videos that let you, the player, choose ‘Wot Wud U Do’ in several scenarios.

The prototype showed the potential and our next steps was to secure further funding to build upon our success, but found many doors for a creative approach to education were locked. So we applied for a loan and began building a bigger and better version of the prototype. A team of student actors, film makers and creatives came together to coproduce the interactive videos we use today, using our knowledge and life experience as a young person growing up in Preston.

You can view the end product here login and emailing dave@www.wotwududo.co.uk to gain your personal login details. These interactive videos are designed to help open conversations with young people around sex, healthy and unhealthy relationships, consent, pressure, and sexting.

Fast forward a few years, we used these interactive videos to engage and open conversations with young people, using our lived experience to deliver peer education in colleges, secondary schools, universities, pupil referral units, care homes and community settings across Lancashire.

The peer education worked both ways.

As we began to develop ourselves both personally and professionally, we decide our impact was not enough! Often, we ran one off workshops and felt we were leaving students behind, who needed more support, more conversations and more openness and confidence too challenge societal norms.

We set out to create that change and collate an entire life time of knowledge into one, 89 page teacher booklet. We weren’t professionals, we never studied health and wellbeing, or got qualifications in the relevant subjects. All our knowledge was gained through either lived experience, or through conversations with people who had experienced unhealthy, negative, attitudes and behaviours from individuals for whom this was a totally normal way to treat someone. This booklet consisted of several lesson plans, classroom activities and PSHE curriculum links, signposting to local health services and community organisations, highlighting opportunities for young people, addressing parents and carers concerns and general youth engagement and teaching strategies.

No one, not one organisation in the UK were doing what we were doing. Yes, larger organisations offered universal approaches and information and yes, you had organisations like try life who had the interactive video element, but none, that we came across, brought both elements together in way that provided everything a professional, working with young people needed.

Alongside this workbook, we also offered the schools the opportunity to connect with other VCSFE organisations and individuals with lived experience. Designing tailored programmes for individual schools to run. For example, weeks 1-5 deliver lessons around mental health, relationships, behaviours and encourage pupils to make notes. On week 6 invite a guest speaker for whom the young people can ask their questions to.

We worked with LCSFT, Preston domestic violence service and ‘The JJ Effect’ who provided that wrap around support and lived experience as part of the programme we ran. This programme was funded through the community safety partnership in Preston, in which we worked closely with the team around schools team at Lancashire county council.

We went from content creators, to delivering the content, to training others to deliver the content, to facilitating and improving the relationships between the schools and local VCSFE organisations and health services.

Our funding ended.

Schools and teachers had other priorities. . .

Councils funded other universal schools projects. . .

What now?

Our work was second to none. We were creatives with lived experience, not business people, not health or educational professionals, nor people with influential friends.

But we caught a lucky break, thanks to twitter. Yes Twitter. We came across a post about coproduction and if any VCSFE organisation would like to take part in an NHS dragons den styled coproduction event. With nothing to lose, we signed up and was the beginning of the next chapter in our personal and professional development. Find out more about how that project developed here.

Which brings us to today.

Engaging and educating young people and young adults who don’t fit in, improving their social, emotional and mental health.

Check out our projects