Digital Deployment Pack for Young People Launches

Forces Children Scotland has launched tailored digital support to help young people overcome unique deployment challenges.

An interactive deployment rollercoaster is at the heart of this resource, providing lots of information, advice, and downloadable resources to help understand how they may feel at various points of the Deployment Cycle.

Deployment can be challenging, bringing feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and isolation throughout the seven stages of the cycle. Consultations with this community, led by the charity, evidenced a need for child-friendly, accessible information.

Funding from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust and BFBS Big Salute enabled the charity to work directly with young people over the past year.

Judith Blair, Learning and Development Worker for Forces Children Scotland, said:

“Forces Children Scotland’s co-produced Deployment Rollercoaster has been an engaging, fun and extremely rewarding project to work on.

The funding has enabled us to work directly with children and young people from armed forces communities to co-develop the resource.  By listening specifically to their lived experience, we have been able to co-produce a resource which understands the specific needs of this community.

During our discovery sessions at the start of the project we engaged with five local authorities including Fife, Moray, Edinburgh, West Dunbartonshire and Argyll and Bute. These local authorities were selected as they contain some of the highest concentrated areas of military families in Scotland.

Overall, we delivered 18 sessions with 139 children, young people and parents across Scotland in the initial stages of our participation work. In the final stage of production, we had a core group of five young people who helped finalise the design and make any necessary changes.

This group were involved in a workshop with Civic, our design partner and we regularly met up through online zoom sessions and in-person sessions to discuss content and resources for each stage of the rollercoaster.

Our core group of young people tried out various protypes and discussed different ways the rollercoaster could be displayed on screen. They decided on an interactive, moving roller coaster cart on the website to make it fun, child-friendly and accessible to young people.

With the launch of the Deployment Rollercoaster, we hope that it will support children and young people with their mental health and wellbeing and will prove to be a successful and trusted resource to use in the future.”

A young person involved in co-producing Forces Children Scotland’s Digital Deployment Pack resource, said:

“It feels great knowing that we will make a change in other people’s lives and that what we have been working towards is happening and we are a part of it! ⁠I hope that we can help young people, especially in armed forces families, not stress as much about their parent being deployed, and find interesting and useful ways to relieve some of that stress.

I would like other people to learn and understand that we aren’t weak just because we get upset or stressed when our parent gets deployed, we are strong people, and I hope this deployment pack makes it enjoyable and relaxing to use as they go through this difficult time!

I’m extremely excited to launch the deployment pack as this will help others and teachers understand some of the challenges we go through as a forces family! I would say (to young people going through a parental deployment) that it would be a great idea (to check out the resource) as it will help distract your mind and help relieve anxiety and nerves when your parents are deployed!”

Visit our Digital Deployment Pack Resource