Shropshire military children take part in charity workshop

A total of 114 children from primary schools in the county took part in a free virtual workshop run by Little Troopers this week.

As part of a nationwide virtual roadshow being delivered by the charity throughout June, children from Shawbury and Market Drayton who have parents currently serving in the British Armed Forces logged in together to explore some the unique challenges they might experience.

This could include having a parent deployed overseas and regularly having to move home and school.

All of the workshop activities were from the charity’s dedicated Little Troopers at School programme, which was created by education experts to give all schools easily accessible resources to support military children in the classroom.

The group took part in storytelling, imaginative play, movement and drama and were shown tools that could help them navigate some of the challenges they might face as military children.

The workshops were funded by the Armed Forces Covenant Fund and offered schools a snapshot of some of the resources available in the Little Troopers primary school resource pack and military child wellbeing course.

Louise Fetigan, founder and operations manager at Little Troopers, said: “There are tens of thousands of military children across the UK and the support they receive in school is very varied depending on where they live in the country and what school they go to.

"Our aim with the Little Troopers at School programme is to make it really easy for schools to have targeted resources they can use with their military children – whether that’s one or two military children or 200.

"We want to make sure that wherever children live and however many schools they go to, they can access support if they need it and that all schools have a good understanding of the unique challenges that military life can bring.

“We had originally planned to run a physical roadshow last summer, but as with many things, the pandemic changed our plans.

"It’s actually turned out for the best as our virtual workshops have enabled us to reach far more military children than we could have seen in person and we hope that the children who have taken part will really benefit from the session, as well as having had lots of fun."

This year marks 10 years since Louise registered a charity to support children with parents serving in the British armed forces.

As well as the school programme, Little Troopers also has a number of free resources that parents can use to support children at home.

For more information visit littletroopers.net.