Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Structured education should be appropriate to the learning styles of participants. Health professionals and experts in education worked together to develop KICk-OFF for 11–16 year olds and similar experience has now been used in the development of Junior KICk-OFF for Key Stage (KS) 1 (4–7 years) and KS2 (7–11 years).

Method: The KICk-OFF team developed the curricula with input from teachers and an academic educationalist. Sections of the curriculum were tested initially within a primary school and then adapted to create full curricula for each KS group. The social constructivist approach was used emphasising a variety of tasks and assessment for learning approaches.

Two Junior KICK-OFF courses have been held to test out the material and curriculum. These were observed by the educationalist and videoed to allow further refinement of the curriculum and training.

Results: The education profession influenced Junior KICk-OFF through guidance on:

i) Age appropriate activities.

ii) Use of familiar school teaching resources e.g. puppets, story sacks, counting lines.

iii) Timings for activities.

iv) Use of the resources to produce a KS2 knowledge assessment.

v) Development of a peer review assessment system for quality assurance of courses.

Initial educationalist observation report showed:

i) Children found the course stimulating and enjoyable.

ii) The curriculum was well structured with a logical sequence of concepts and variety of tasks.

iii) Improvements in factual recall and understanding of concepts were demonstrated in assessment for learning activities.

Key points for enhancing the curriculum were:

i) Greater emphasis on the individual monitoring of progress.

ii) Courses could be longer.

iii) Emphasis of group rules for dominating individuals.

iv) More time for talking together to allow deeper thinking.

Discussion: Sharing expertise between professions has resulted in structured education courses tailored to the developmental age and learning needs of children within primary school.