Cancer awareness project in schools a success

North East London Cancer Alliance has funded a project being run by CATTs (Cancer Awareness for Teens and Twenties) that is delivering a series of engaging cancer awareness workshops to Year 10 and Year 11 pupils in secondary schools in the boroughs of Redbridge and Havering.

The cancer awareness workshops cover: what is cancer, the signs and symptoms of cancer, how to check your body including breasts and testicles and encourage, how to reduce your chances of developing cancers including sun safety and promote positive health seeking behaviours. All this is in line with the PSHE curriculum.

We’ve engaged with a number of schools to date and delivered workshops to approximately 2,000 students. Feedback has been excellent from the schools, including the letter below received from Sacred Heart School in Havering.

"Thank you for taking the time to come to our school today to deliver the cancer awareness workshop to our year 10 students.

I thought that the workshop was perfectly pitched to the age group and so full of useful information. The feedback from the year 10 students has been fantastic. As you are aware our school community is currently sadly affected by cancer as one of our students in year 10 is currently undergoing treatment. Your message about knowing what's normal and how to go about getting help was very poignant and I could see it really resonated with them.

I also thought that the section you delivered on testicular cancer was great too. I did carefully consider if we would include that in the workshop due to it being an all girls school. But, we thought that it was important for the girls to be informed on all aspects, and we were right, as I think that our students will have gone home at the end of the day and would have talked through what they had learnt with their wider family network.

I thought the workshop was very empowering for our students and I think that you are delivering a vital health message to a generation who will undoubtedly be affected by cancer.  I would have no hesitation in wanting to ask you back to repeat the workshop to next year's cohort if there was the funding available.

Once again, thank you so much for visiting Sacred Heart."

Data is still being collected and analysed but nearly all students have reported the sessions have significantly increased their confidence and knowledge in knowing signs and symptoms of cancer and what to do.

More analysis and data is needed on the post-4 week survey to see how much information has been retained by students and understanding more about whether they have taken that home for conversations with friends and family.

A full report is due later in the summer to evaluate but we are looking already at a business case to continue funding into the new academic year 23/24.

Jake Chambers, Project Manager for the cancer awareness in schools project, said "We are really pleased that not only has the uptake of the workshops been high, feedback has been really positive. Educating young people as soon as possible on how to spot cancer, and how to reduce your risk of getting it, is critical to the future health and wellbeing of our local population.

"The fact that we are able to do this in schools with such impact is a big boost to our priority of improving early diagnosis of cancer, making it is easier to treat."