Partnership with Team Margot to educate primary school students about giving to help others
1 November 2017
NHS Blood and Transplant is proud to have partnered with Team Margot to develop a new education programme aimed at young children for use in Primary Schools.
The Giving to Help Others programme has been designed for school children aged 5-11 to introduce them to the various forms of life-saving donation and was launched at City Hall on Monday 30 October.
The centre-piece of the programme is an engaging animation that can be used by teachers in school assemblies or in the classroom to introduce their pupils to the idea of giving to help others.
Within the video we meet a number of characters who help others. Amira is kind and helps Noah by playing with him, Miss Khan helps Olivia when she hurts herself and Rudy helps Mrs Williams cross the road. We also meet Asha who is sick and needs a stem cell transplant. She receives the treatment she needs thanks to someone donating their bone marrow to save her.
Teachers can show the video to their pupils and then use a series of slides to encourage them to consider why they would help someone, to think back to when they last helped someone and to think about how they can help family members, friends, people in the local community and around the world. This leads into age appropriate information about stem cell and bone marrow donation.
The Team Margot Foundation, set up to honour Margot Martini, who sadly died aged two years and two months in 2014, is behind the initiative. The Foundation is an established campaigning organisation dedicated to raising awareness about the need for more potential bone marrow/stem cell donors.
Yaser Martini, Margot’s father, said: “As Margot’s father I saw first-hand how difficult it can be for mixed race patients to find a stem cell match when they need a life-saving transplant. The reality is that there is an urgent need to raise awareness of the need for stem cell donors particularly among black, Asian and mixed race communities. In the UK, our bone marrow/stem cell, blood and organ donor base is not diverse enough and black, Asian, minority ethnic and mixed race communities are under-represented on donor registers.
“We hope to change this. We believe that education resources, such as those we have developed in partnership with NHS Blood and Transplant, will over time help to increase black, Asian, minority ethnic and mixed race donors. Through introducing young children to the concept of donation from a young age, in an age appropriate manner, we hope that donating blood and platelets and registering as both bone marrow/stem cell and organ donors will hopefully become a natural progression for them once they are old enough to start donating blood, registering as a stem cell donor or signing up as organ donors.”
Ian Trenholm, Chief Executive of NHS Blood and Transplant, said: “We’re delighted to have partnered with Team Margot to build a powerful education programme to engage primary school children, teachers, parents and carers to teach them about the importance of ‘giving to help others’: that donation is the norm, not the exception.
“It’s really important that we reach people at a young age to help them understand the importance of giving. And we hope that not only will children grow up believing that donating is a crucial thing to do, but that they will be inspired to go home and talk to their parents about what they learnt, encouraging their parents, who are old enough to donate, to save lives through blood, organ and stem cell donation.”
Giving help to others
Notes:
Watch the video and to find out more about the education resources
Team Margot is also running a photographic exhibition in conjunction with City Hall’s Education and Youth Team: The Power of One until Friday 24 November.