EPISODE NOTES In this episode, Claire talks with Darryl Walsh and Dr Martin Yelling, founders of Stormbreak: a registered charity promoting movement and physical activity to improve mental health in primary schools. Despite their quite different backgrounds, Martin and Darryl came together with a shared interest in using movement to equip children with sustainable, transferable skills and coping strategies that can be drawn upon to promote good mental health into adult life. The result was Stormbreak which works with schools, children and staff to deliver training and coaching programmes to up-skill teachers and equip children with a variety of useful strategies and inclusive approaches. Martin and Darryl discuss how important movement and physical activity within schools is and how useful it can be for the development of good mental health for both children and adults. They share some great tips and advice including addressing some of the misconceptions around movement in education and how some activities in school might be adapted or further developed.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Little and often is best for long-term gains. Rather than just having mental health focus weeks, or infrequent wellbeing activities or days, building in discussions about mental health within day-to-day teaching and normalising conversations on these topics can have real long-term benefits. Too often, mental health and wellbeing can get lost, forgotten or be inadvertently treated as an ‘add on’. The key is considering what needs to be in place to achieve sustainable improvements rather than have a ‘sticking plaster’ approach. Get teachers to be confident with movement. There can be a perception that you need to be ‘good’ at sport or physical activity to be able to bring movement into your teaching or routines more generally and beyond the elements found within PE. However, there is no such thing as being ‘good’ with movement, especially in regards to introducing it as something that can benefit mental health. It should be something that all teachers can feel confident with doing at any point.   BEST MOMENTS "It was really clear to me that that teachers get very little or no training on mental health at all in their in their training. Yet the prevalence of need for children within schools was quite high." "For me, there needed to be something different. Something sustainable. Something that looked at prevention at scale. Something that looked at supporting children and giving them a toolkit: skills and knowledge to be able to support themselves with their mental health as they work their way through childhood to adulthood." "We work with five different mental health concepts: Self-worth, self-care, resilience, relationships, and hope and optimism. And you can't work with those concepts with the children, talking about those things with the children, without reflecting on them for yourself." "What we see when we do our programmes with teachers is they say to us, 'I need this so much for my own wellbeing.'" "Why do we wait until we are grownups to realise that [movement] is a benefit? If we see movement through the right lenses, and we're helped to understand how it can support us in so many different ways, then we can build it in to our life." "As adults, we often rediscover that movement is something that is helpful to support our mental health. But why should we have to wait until we're adults to be able to know that?" "What we see is that when you place wellbeing at the heart of the life of the school, other things really flow as well." "A really important thing about moving is there's no need to be good. What is good? There shouldn't be an elitism around movement. You don't need to be 'good'. You just need to do it." "I don't care how fast you run a mile. I don't care if you keep going or not. What we care about is 'what's t