Topical Resources
Tooled Up Events
- Parent Webinar
- Miranda Eodanable, Educational Psychologist and PhD Researcher
- February 10, 2023
- 12:30
- GMT
- Staff Only
- Dr Ingrid Obsuth
- February 17, 2023
- 12:30
- GMT
- Staff Only
- Simon Pettit, Deputy Head of Pre Prep, York House School
- February 20, 2023
- 12:30
- GMT
- February 27, 2023
- 19:30
- GMT
- Parent Webinar
- Dr Lisa Sugiura, University of Portsmouth
- March 14, 2023
- 19:30
- GMT
- Parent Webinar
- Professor Gareth Morgan (Children’s Hospital Colorado)
- March 15, 2023
- 19:30
- GMT
- March 22, 2023
- 16:00
- GMT
- Parent Webinar
- Dr Lisa Sugiura, University of Portsmouth
- April 25, 2023
- 19:30
- BST
- Parent Webinar
- Professor Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas
- April 27, 2023
- 19:30
- BST
Guidance for Educational Settings
Following a Suicide or Sudden Death
To mark World Suicide Prevention Day on Saturday 10th September, we are proud to have published a resource for schools, written in collaboration with suicide prevention charity, The OLLIE Foundation. This comprehensive guide will provide leadership teams in schools and other educational settings with the detailed guidance needed to coordinate an appropriate, helpful and safe response following the tragic event of a suicide or sudden death in their community.
This invaluable resource is available for free. Simply click the button below to view and download the PDF.
The home of evidence-based resources on all aspects of parenting, education and family life
Schools that are part of our Tooled Up Education community can provide their parents and teachers with access to Dr Weston’s exclusive resources, covering areas such as aspiration, resilience, mental health and behaviour.
As a member of the Tooled Up community you will have access to a whole host of evidence-based resources, which will enable you to support your children or students in a way that makes their lives and educational journeys both easier and more enjoyable.
Dr Weston's Wednesday Wisdom
In an ever increasingly busy and demanding world, Wednesday Wisdom provides a reflective 2 minute read every week that readers constantly tell us they look forward to. Full of topical and relatable experiences that help provide reflection, motivation and support in achieving a balanced family life.
Over the years, thousands of people have benefitted from, and continue to enjoy, the parenting and educational talks from Dr Kathy Weston at Tooled Up Education and have subscribed to Wednesday Wisdom. Join now for free to get your own weekly digest of motivating, interesting, and thoughtful parenting advice from Dr Weston herself.
“I just wanted to say how grateful I am to read your Wednesday Wisdom email. Perfect size for the time I have to engage and reflect and think about the topics you touch on. It helps me to evaluate my parenting and take a step back to look at scenarios that play out.”
Parent – October 2020
Children’s Champions
Who or what can influence and inspire our children as they grow and develop? Who can inspire us as adults and why? How can we support our children to reach their physical potential when there are so many digital temptations to stay inside and on the sofa? What difference can one person make in shaping our children’s decisions about their futures? These were some of the questions I was mulling over last week, before a series of interviews with elite athletes.
Parenting Question of the Week
My wife suffers with health conditions and has been diagnosed with cancer. The chemotherapy is starting to become difficult for her and I am concerned about the impact this may have on my child’s learning at school. I am also concerned that my son doesn’t bottle things up and that we do all that we can to help him feel supported.
Our Promise: We will answer all questions, and, whilst we may share your question and answer to help others, we will never declare who asked it.
Researcher of the Month
Dr Cele Richardson, Clinical Psychologist and Lecturer in the School of Psychological Science and Centre for Sleep Science at the University of Western Australia.
Research Interests
Dr Richardson’s research primarily focuses on sleep and mental health in young people. Sleep and internalising problems, such as depression and anxiety, commonly co-occur and she works to elucidate mechanisms linking sleep with emotional problems in adolescence.
Sleep problems are extremely common during adolescence and lack of or low quality sleep is increasingly being causally linked to poor mental health. Various research papers have examined how parents might be able to support teens to sleep better. Parental warmth has previously been found to protect sleep in early adulthood, yet the nature, directions, and mechanisms of this association were unknown. Our Researcher of the Month, Dr Cele Richardson and co-authors, have found that parental warmth is indirectly associated with better adolescent sleep through healthier sleep hygiene practices and that better adolescent sleep is often associated with greater parental warmth, because these adolescents have better sleep practices.
The study found that teens who reported higher levels of parental warmth had healthier sleep hygiene practices, were more likely to be early birds (have a preference for ‘morningness’), sleep longer on school nights and be less sleepy during the day. Good sleep practices were also linked to greater parental warmth, mainly because there is likely to be less conflict and strain on the parent-child relationship around bedtimes.
The paper confirms that good sleep hygiene is fundamental to getting high quality sleep. Engaging in fewer sleep hygiene practices consistently predicted worsening of sleep and daytime functioning, and teens at risk of inadequate sleep tended to engage in fewer sleep hygiene practices over time. The study showed that young people may increase unhelpful practices, such as reducing daytime activity to conserve energy or using substances to promote sleep and minimise daytime impairment, in an effort to overcome poor sleep. This can inadvertently contribute to sleep troubles.
Implications for parents
Parental warmth may protect against developmental changes in adolescent sleep, partially by improving sleep hygiene practices. Parents should foster a warm relationship with teens, providing them with emotional support, encouragement and spending time together doing shared activities. Try to approach interactions about sleep in a loving and caring manner, not in an authoritarian way. Sleep problems can place understandable strain on the parent-child relationship. It’s important to recognise that decreased parental warmth may further perpetuate poor sleep, creating a vicious cycle.
Implications for schools
This study support the inclusion of sleep hygiene content in adolescent sleep interventions. When it comes to school-based sleep hygiene interventions, many increase teens’ sleep knowledge without changing sleep behaviours, which is critical for actual improvement in sleep. Schools implementing sleep hygiene interventions should seek programmes that adopt a knowledge-to-action framework and those which foster teen’s self-efficacy and self-regulation of sleep. Schools might also like to create strong parent partnerships, emphasising the importance of loving, warm communication around sleep and more generally.
Tooled Up News
Studying Shakespeare?
Is your teen working towards their GCSEs? Macbeth is a key GCSE text for many of our teens and we are extremely excited to share the arrival of our new Supporting Macbeth resources for our Tooled Up community. These are revision resources for Macbeth written with parental engagement and home study in mind.
Shining a Light on Kindness
Given that World Kindness Day was celebrated earlier this month, on November 13th, now seems a good time to talk about the results of a very large and exciting public science project. The Kindness Test was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 in conjunction with a team from the University of Sussex, led by our brilliant former podcast guest, Professor Robin Banerjee. A whopping 60,000 people aged 18-99, from 144 different countries filled out the online questionnaire, making it the world’s largest in-depth study on kindness to date.
It's good to talk about mental health, but do children in your home genuinely feel able to reach out? Can they identify their sources of support? Thinking about pathways to support and practising help-seeking is important ahead of times of difficulty or distress.
Parents/educators/schools are in for a treat tonight as two of our favourite SEN specialists @SarahCo85095085 and Kate King of https://www.skylark-consulting.co.uk/ present a joint webinar on practical strategies for supporting children with Dyslexia. Registration open:
https://www.tooledupeducation.com/event/practical-strategies-for-parents-in-supporting-children-with-dyslexia/
#SaferInternetDay2023 One of the greatest tools in parents' toolbox is family talk; asking children what they love about digital tech, establishing digital values, caring about digital diets, ensuring our children can tell us when have seen something upsetting.
Sending our deepest and heartfelt condolences to the communities of @EpsomCollegeUK & Croydon High School @CroydonHigh on the tragic loss of Emma Pattison & her family - from our founder, @parentengage and our whole team @TooledUpTips
Calling all Tooled Up parents - as usual, we’ve got exciting webinars coming up and you can sign up now! Stay tuned for more.
Register your place via the link: https://bit.ly/3l6RmD7
#learning #children #mentalhealth #wellbeing #mentalhealthawareness
@S_Paillasse @EpsomC_Head @GDST Truly devastating
Our Researcher of the Month, Dr Cele Richardson and co-authors, used data from the RAW Project (a large dataset of teenage socio-emotional development) to examine the impact of parental warmth on teen sleep.
Read the full article via the link: https://bit.ly/40wWukn
@StMarysSchoolGX Great to see rest being prioritised for mental health and wellbeing!
This week's Wednesday Wisdom is out now.
Read the full article and sign up for our weekly updates via the link: https://bit.ly/3HqSUiF
#parents #parentingtips #school #teachers #children #familytime #dailyparenting
...and have an active Tooled Up Education account at the time of entry and on 14th February 2023 when the winner is announced. If we choose to use your entry for marketing purposes, we will contact you by email for permission first.
Terms and Conditions
*Closing date to submit messages by email to newsletters@tooledupeducation.com is 5pm on 1st February 2023.
**Entrants must be over 18 years old at the time of submitting an entry...
💙 If you want to make our day and warm our hearts, send a short video, a quick email, write us a poem, sing a song or do a dance routine.
💙All members of our Tooled Up community are invited to join in the fun.
💙 Send your entries to newsletters@tooledupeducation.com.
💙 Tooled Up Members, today is your last chance to win a Thermomix TM6 kitchen appliance worth over £1000.
💙 Entries to our ‘Love Tooled Up’ competition close at 5pm tonight.
@MethodyBelfast @MCB_girlshockey 👏👏👏
Our founder @Parentengage is looking forward to interviewing @LeorZmigrod shortly about her work into the emotional and cognitive characteristics that make individuals susceptible to extremist ideologies. We start every journey to resource creation by reviewing the evidence.
Next week, we'll consult two brilliant practitioners, Kate King and Sarah Cox @OsborneCawkwell, who are adept at working on a 1:1 basis with children and can provide both inspiration and ideas for busy parents and school staff:
https://www.tooledupeducation.com/event/practical-strategies-for-parents-in-supporting-children-with-dyslexia/
Have you got a @kittmedical kit in your school? They provide spare emergency adrenaline pens for schools. Spare pens should be compulsory in all schools as they can be a life saver. It’s definitely worth checking them out. https://twitter.com/kittmedical/status/1618367459320557573
We’ve had so many of YOU amazing allergy mums and dads reaching out to us in the last few days asking for information you can present to your children’s schools about our Anaphylaxis Kitt service!
We’ll get back to you as soon as we can - keep them coming! 🙌🏻
#allergy #school
The Holocaust is a difficult subject to discuss, but it's one that is essential for our children to learn about. We created a booklist to mark #HolocaustMemorialDay and hope that it will spark discussion and understanding in your home: https://bit.ly/3kJOSKx
#LightTheDarkness
💡Do you know how to browse resources and use our filters to tailor the search to your needs?
Here’s a reminder of how our digital library works. Should you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us!
Start your search here: https://bit.ly/403jJlv
This week's Wednesday Wisdom is out now.
Read the full article and sign up for our weekly updates via the link: https://bit.ly/3JnadDQ
#parents #parentingtips #school #teachers #children #familytime #dailyparenting #allergies
This week’s webinars are all about sports! These talks are perfect for any budding athletes out there, whatever their sporting interest. So make sure to register your place and tune in to this week’s webinars: https://bit.ly/3Xx3Xh8
#parenting #education #children #teens
@BWPMatron @Parentengage @_allergylondon @theallergyteam Our great pleasure
We created an activity that encourages children to notice all the kind things that they do for others. There are plenty of ideas for them to try, but there’s also lots of space for them to write down their own kind acts: https://bit.ly/3WkyXzv
#parenting #familysupport
Does parental warmth have a positive impact on teens’ sleep?
Our Researcher of the Month, Dr Cele Richardson and co-authors, used data from the RAW Project to examine the impact of parental warmth on teen sleep.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3ZQppPJ
Looking forward to our Q&A webinar tonight at 730pm on allergies - with Professor Adam Fox of @_allergylondon and Sarah Knight of @theallergyteam both of whom know EVERYTHING! Please don't miss this brilliant opportunity to ask ANYTHING! Registration on front of our site.
@Char_Markey Parents modelling the ability to unsubscribe, unfollow or mute anything online that makes them feel bad about themselves or their bodies. Parents looking in the mirror and saying "I look ok today!" rather than being unkind to themselves!
This week's Wednesday Wisdom is out now.
Read the full article and sign up for our weekly updates via the link: https://bit.ly/3QQgWrZ
#parents #parentingtips #family #parenting #school #teachers #children #familytime #dailyparenting
📢We've reached a Tooled Up milestone! The 550th resource has just been added to our digital library. Every week we add resources, in response to school staff and parent requests. We love our proactive Tooled Up schools. We learn, we grow, we find out together. #ittakesavillage
@FSLnews Wow!
Testimonials
Join Our Community of "Tooled Up" Members
Have a Question?
If you are interested in learning more about Tooled Up Education, have a technical question, press enquiry or any other query, please follow the link below or get in touch with Dr Weston’s team on email: office@tooledupeducation.com
