Ensuring That Future Generations Think Equal

Aim: To bring good mental health, wellbeing, equality, diversity & inclusion to our children through early years social and emotional learning.

Project Update - April 2024

The current reach of this project is 120 Classrooms across Glasgow, Hounslow and Ealing. We have surpassed our 20% year 1 target by 5%, reaching 330 more children than predicted this academic year - thank you for your support!

A few pieces of teacher feedback so far…

• “The children are talking about ‘we’ more regularly now and not always ‘I’. Think Equal has supported ‘perspective - taking’ by enabling children to put themselves in another’s shoes and empathise.”  Glasgow Practitioner.
• “I've got a little boy that's really struggled with regulation from the beginning of Reception but since starting Think Equal his regulation has got a lot better and he'll relate it back to some of the stories that we’ve read.” Hounslow Reception Teacher

What drives us?

Here at Think Equal our mission is to build a safe, free and equal world through education. 

Every parent, carer and family member wants a strong and happy start in life for our little ones, but we cannot rely on families alone to deliver an even handed foundation for every child, that's where we come in! 

What do we do?

Early years education provides the golden opportunity to give every child the competencies and skills they need to thrive into adulthood, so we equip teachers with training and learning materials to deliver Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) with the same level of importance as numeracy and literacy. After all, how can we deem it essential for children to learn how to add, subtract and read, but deem it optional for children to learn how to understand and regulate their emotions, lead healthy relationships and respect everyone, regardless of race or gender. 

Think Equal is the evidence-based SEL programme currently implemented in 28 countries around the world, including over 2000 classrooms in the UK. This programme equips nursery, Reception and Year 1 teachers with key training and materials to deliver 30 weeks of comprehensive learning to children, covering competencies and skills such as empathy, emotional literacy, self-esteem, environmental stewardship, peaceful conflict resolution and more. 

Some children are lucky enough to receive this learning at home, but we believe that levelling the playing field at this early stage gives every child the chance to thrive and have positive outcomes in later life. The impact of this golden opportunity is high, because early years SEL has ‘long term positive effects on crime, employment, health, cognitive and non-cognitive skills and other outcomes for the participant and those around them’ (James Heckman, Nobel Prize Laureate, 2019). 

Does this really work?

The early years really are a key moment. Even though we can’t fully remember them, we all know the impact that our early childhoods have had on our lives. The psychological and neuroscientific evidence is clear… 

• Brains are built over time, from the bottom up.
  • The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Early experiences establish the foundation for all of the learning, health and behaviour that follow. 
  • In the first few years of life, more than 1 million new neural connections are formed every second.
• The brain’s capacity for change decreases with age.
  • The brain is most flexible, or “plastic,” early in life, so it’s easier and more effective to influence a child’s developing brain architecture than to rewire parts of its circuitry in the adult years.

(Harvard Center on the Developing Child, 2007)

The Think Equal programme meets every child where they are as they enter the education system, and works to build a strong foundation to ensure both school and life readiness. The programme has been evaluated through three global Randomised Control Trials (the gold standard of evaluation), with powerful impacts found:

• Increased prosocial behaviour and emotion regulation in children receiving Think Equal.
• Decreased anger, anxiety, aggression and antisocial behaviour in children receiving Think Equal.
• Children with poorer baseline scores tended to benefit the most from Think Equal.
• Practitioners delivering Think Equal experienced increased empathy and mental wellbeing. 

British Airways believe in this work:

The BA Community Fund team has seen the impact and value of this intervention, and has invested to bring the programme to every Reception classroom in Hounslow and Ealing, and every Local Authority Nursery in Glasgow, over the next 3 years. They are investing in our mission to reach every child in the world with this programme, and are excited to equip a further 477 classrooms in the UK, reaching 15,000 children in year one. As our training is open access for our classrooms, and our programme is designed to last for 10+ years, we conservatively expect this project to reach over 100,000 children in total.

What can you do?

During this giving season, we are crowdfunding to expand the size of this project to offer the programme to even more classrooms in the UK, to ensure every child receives the building blocks for a successful future. We are hoping to fund an additional 100 classrooms in the UK.

Giving what you can is all we could ever ask for, but luckily our classroom programme has a super clear cost structure that enables you to fund a few milestones, if you can…

• Each classroom costs £240, inclusive of the training, materials and support to teachers.
• Reaching each child therefore costs around £10.

As a registered charity in the UK, you can give with confidence that your donations only have one destination: bringing this programme to more UK classrooms. Don’t forget to tell us if you're a registered UK tax payer, because the Government's GiftAid Scheme will add 25% to your donation. 

We cannot thank you enough!