How we created the resources

They felt the stories were a great way in to talk about difficult issues children and young people might be experiencing at home. This inspired us to set out to do some more work to ensure more people could benefit from the stories in the book.

As part of this second stage of development, we created six individual books, one for each of the stories, with additional illustrations to make them more interesting and accessible for young people. To do this, we worked with a creative youth action group of children and young people from primary and secondary schools in South West Durham, to develop a brief for our illustrator Tamsin and feedback their ideas on their draft illustrations. The group explored the places and spaces where the stories take place to develop ideas for a map which forms a key part of the website, as well as the front covers of the six new books.

We created resources such as worksheets and creative activities for teachers and supporting adults to use to help children and young people explore the themes raised in the stories, with the aim of enabling them to have supportive conversations about things which may be affecting young people at home. We worked with the creative youth action group to test out these activities, get their feedback on them and build our ideas of activities young people would enjoy and engage with.

The creative youth action group also helped develop ideas for the website that our web developers Vida Creative built to host the stories and resources in multimedia formats.

The creative youth action group sessions were delivered by artist Sarah Stamp, alongside youth workers from Learning a New Way, and involved a range of creative activities which generated and tested ideas for the book, website and resources. We followed this process to make sure that the books, website and resources were relevant and interesting to young people as they are the ones who will be using them so they know best!

The 2023 phase of development brought together a creative team, some of whom had been involved in the initial project, including writer Bridget Hamilton, illustrator Tamsin Rees and graphic designers Curious 12, as well as involving additional creatives professionals, including visual artist, facilitator and creative producer, Sarah Stamp, web developers, Vida Creative and artist and designer, Megan Watson, who designed the creative resource sheets.

Throughout the 2023 phase of development, we worked with academics at Durham University to ensure we were exploring the themes in the stories in a safe and supportive way. More information about this research partnership can be found on the Approach & Research page.

If you would be interested in support and guidance to give your staff / colleagues confidence to use our resources, take a look at our Training & CPD.