The launch of Cornwall Council's new Healthy Schools Toolkit, aimed at helping schools in Cornwall boost the health and wellbeing of their pupils and the wider community, was held at Heamoor Community Primary School in Penzance on Saturday, October 19
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00:00We are here today to celebrate the launch of the Cornwall Healthy Schools Toolkit which is hosted on the Healthy Cornwall website.
00:07So the Healthy Schools Toolkit is a collaborative piece of work and it celebrates all the work of the services that are supporting our schools in Cornwall.
00:15So the toolkit is an online resource that makes sure that we've got all key guidance, resources and recommendations in one easy place.
00:23At the moment pressures on schools is particularly high but we're expecting them to feed out more and more health improvement messages to support families.
00:33What schools really need is to find the information that can support them to do that there and then and that's the aim of the toolkit.
00:41So the toolkit does cover things that you might expect such as eating well and being active but we've really gone beyond that to try and be a bit more creative
00:49and think about things such as being safe online, our dental and oral health, how schools can really support the environment and the benefits for schools of being out in nature like today.
01:01A really important part of the toolkit is also not to assume that schools aren't doing anything already.
01:06What we can see is that amazing activity is happening across the county where schools are really committed to improving their children and their families health and wellbeing.
01:16So what this toolkit allows us to do is to celebrate the amazing things that are already happening and just to give schools and home education settings different ideas about topics that they can explore and activities they can build into their curriculum.
01:29Really importantly as well, a big part of this is to support the school staff and the wellbeing of people that are working really hard to support our children and young people.
01:38We've used the toolkit in lots of different ways, so we've used it for our healthy eating focus, we've used the dental health section for our youngest children in school and this is sort of the next stage in using the toolkit.
01:50There's a huge section around children being outdoors, boosting their wellbeing and learning where food comes from and how to grow it.
01:57It's not giving schools another job to do, it's about supporting them and giving them the tools to run alongside that.
02:04I'm really happy and proud to be here today with Haymore School as they're such a great ambassador of what it means to be a healthy school.
02:10As you will see behind me, there's lots of people working, we've got Healthy Cornwall here and we've got lots of community partners as well as families from the school as well.
02:20The project, the aim of it is to give some allotments back to the children and families from our school to allow them during these very tough times to grow their own food, fruit and vegetables, get a sense of belonging and also to help put some meals on the table for those children.
02:35And also for the children to learn about actually the foods that we do want to eat to make sure that we can live longer and live healthier lifestyles.
02:43The fruit you'd plant here would be a nice place to just come, you could start a gardening club and you could get fruit and as long as you look after it, they'll be fine and then all that food could go to the school kitchen and we could have it for lunch.
03:02Then you'd just have loads of energy, you'd feel amazing and yeah.
03:07You would just feel better.
03:09And if you have healthy children then you'd have more people every day so more people would get to learn.
03:16We're all really excited about the launch of the health toolkit and the increasing integration of education and health and wellbeing.
03:26As we all know Cornwall's a great place to be a child and to grow up and part of that is about healthy living, sustainable living, about mental health and wellbeing and all of that can be realised through working in nature, thinking about nutrition, working with plants, getting outdoors and getting dirty and that's all part of this kind of work that's going on here today.
03:56.