North Coast Integrated College

Mrs Carol Bryson – Senior Teacher at North Coast College said after our Uberheroes® facilitators visited their school –
“In April 2016 a group of our year 9 students took part in an exciting new programme focus group where the young people were presented with an unique early intervention concept for young people called Uberheroes® – this concept was based on a Superhero style comic which dealt with two issues, that of self-harm and cyber bullying.

The pupils read the 4 page sampler of the comic and were asked to discuss what they as young people liked about the ideas and what they didn’t like, what they would want online for helpful resources, and would they prefer plays or multi-media presentations. The pupils shared their thoughts on the comic format, how it was age appropriate, how it was realistic of the types of problems they are facing and suggested that they would be keen to use this as a platform to talk to their parents.

The experienced Uberheroes® facilitation team from Hope4Life returned in October 2017 to speak with the same group of students; they brought with them the comic that the young people were involved in developing and the students were really keen to read this very professionally drawn and written comic. They enjoyed the engagement and discussions on the issues of cyber-bullying and self-harm helping to come up with solutions to benefit the character in the story. From these sessions the students were able to think of how they could better cope and overcome these issues, who they should talk to and how the good advice given by the Uberheroes staff could be used in their own lives.

During both visits the students were really engaged in the group activities and were keen to discuss these issues with their peers and the facilitators.

We are all looking forward to future visits in the New Year when we plan to involve the whole year group in the Uberheroes® play facilitation and with additional comic discussions dealing with other challenging topics.