Back to school

The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown is an unprecedented situation in modern times. It is hard to gauge the full impact that the situation is having on children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing (https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/coronavirus/returning-school-after-lockdown).   

Pupils’ experiences of the lockdown period will have been very varied. For some, it will mostly have been a safe and enjoyable time. For others, it will have been challenging or traumatic. Schools and teachers are used to supporting their pupils through challenges that they face in life – the current situation will amplify those situations many times over. Lucy Lang (headteacher at Fair Furlong Primary School) brought to us a project this year which she championed to encourage outdoor activity and positive mental health.

Fair Furlong are an Ofsted outstanding rated school based in Withywood Bristol. Sadly, many of the pupils at Fair Furlong haven’t had the opportunity to enjoy many of the activities some of us may take for granted (such as taking a boat trip or making a sandcastle) so Lucy worked with us to create a booklet which would be given to new starters to take through school with them.

The brief was to design the booklet and illustrate 50 icons to represent each of the activities the children aim to complete before leaving school. We suggested stickers to be placed on each icon in the book once the children had completed the activity to (hopefully) create a full sticker booklet by the time the children left the school.

As part of the project we also recreated Fair Furlong’s school logo. There was only a small, low resolution version available which had deteriorated over the years, so we suggested getting this recreated as a vector graphic. The results were a big improvement and now the school has the ability to print this at any size without the logo losing resolution. 

Pictured above are some of the icons we produced and also a before and after shot of the logo we created.

Next month, staying on the education theme, we will be talking about some of the core values projects we have worked on with Mary Elton, Northgate and Fairlawn Primary School. All three projects were collaborations between our design team and teachers and pupils from the school, some as young as 4!