Charity puts sport at the heart of good mental health

A social inclusion charity has put sport at the heart of supporting young people’s mental health.

This week is mental health awareness week, with the theme of Movement: moving more for your mental health – and London-based Sport at the Heart is leading the way when it comes to promoting physical literacy and helping people become active.

Nary Wijeratne, founder and chief executive officer of the social inclusion charity, said: “Physical literacy is the building block to all physical movement and a key factor if a young person has a good relationship with sport, physical activity and movement throughout their life.”

SatH has been part of UK Youth’s Thriving Minds fund, which supports projects which improve mental health support and provision for young people.

Nary said: “The optimum time to develop physical literacy, as with most skills, is between the ages of zero and seven, so those early years are important. However, first experiences of movement and physical activity can be had at any age.

“What we need to do is shift away from the traditional sports and physical activity set-up and look at creative ways of developing opportunities for physical literacy development in youth club and community settings.”

That is where SatH excels, developing different ways to get people moving, particularly in an area lacking such opportunities.

Nary said: “Like with most things in our society, access to developing physical literacy is often dependent on equality of opportunities overall for that person.

“We work in areas and neighbourhoods where there is least access to opportunities. We’re less worried about getting young people to the Olympics than we are about keeping them safe and boosting their confidence, about helping them make friends and find community.”

Brent, Nary says, has one of the highest levels of childhood obesity in England, while 40 per cent of borough children live in poverty, when housing costs are taken into consideration.

Nary said: “After Covid, some demographic groups didn’t bounce back to their pre-pandemic physical activity levels, such as Black boys, women and girls across the board, disabled and those with long-term health conditions, and lower socio-economic groups. The odds are stacked against these young people in all areas of their life and especially when it comes to access to physical activity.

“And in Brent last year, it was reported that, despite having some of the longest waiting lists for child and adolescent mental health services, Brent CAMHS is one of the least funded teams in the whole country, so we know young people with mental health and concerns and challenges are not being seen until they’re in crisis. and that’s too late.

“We’re not developing people just to become athletes. We’re developing people to become fit and active for life. We’re providing opportunities to develop the physical skills needed, things like a good running technique, can you jump and land safely. can you catch a ball, can you hit a ball with a racket, have you got that level of coordination?

“We are developing those skills through lots of different opportunities not really rooted in a traditional sports club setup. Hopefully we’ll get children and young people who are super-physically literate and can go on to live amazing and active lives.

“We ensure opportunities are always fun and inclusive. We take the pressure away from competing and shift the focus onto individual wins – for us, this is ‘can this young person do something today they couldn’t do last week?’

“A lot of young people in schools have terrible PE experiences and write themselves out of sport for the rest of their life, so when we’re presenting sports activities in the youth club or a community setting, we want to take that focus away from the traditional winning and dominance and into something more inclusive and accepting.

“We think outside of the box and are creative in the way we present sports, because ‘non-sporty’ young people, if you present them with sports, they’re not interested, but if you’re creative in the way you incorporate physical literacy, you’ve got a chance.

“We’ve done a Pokémon GO club and which was amazing – I think they racked up about 25,000 steps looking for Pokémon with their phones around the neighbourhood.

“We’ve done gardening and planting, which is physical as well – lots of bending down and lifting and motor skills development.

“We have a PS5 and we’ve just bought a virtual reality headset. The VR has lots of active games and that seems to be quite a hit.

“If our young people don’t have good levels of physical literacy, they’re not going to be able to move in a way that is going to benefit their mental health. There’s been lots of research to say regular movement encourages serotonin and endorphin production, but it also decreases and buffers your body from cortisol, the stress hormone.”

UK Youth is a leading charity with a vision that all young people are equipped to thrive and empowered to contribute at every stage of their lives. With an open network of more than 8,000 youth organisations and nation partners; UK Youth reaches more than four million young people across the UK and is focused on unlocking youth work as the catalyst of change that is needed now more than ever. To find out more, visit ukyouth.org 

UK Youth is involved in a range of programmes designed to help young people thrive, such as outdoor learning, physical literacy, social action and employability, including Hatch, a youth employability programme run in partnership with KFC. For more on UK Youth’s programmes, see ukyouth.org/what-we-do/programmes