Getting It Straight
In June, 2000, the National Lottery Charities Board awarded SAUK a grant of £187,768 to run a three-year national awareness campaign. The campaign objectives were:
- To promote a nationwide educational campaign to highlight the vital importance of early diagnosis and treatment of scoliosis in children, to the general public, parents, teachers, family doctors, and other healthcare professionals throughout the UK
- To dispel fear and stigma surrounding the condition
The first year of the campaign centred on a teaching pack for schools. SAUK, in association with Rapport Learning, produced a free teaching resource that was sent out to 3,000 secondary schools and resulted in 336,000 pupils being taught about scoliosis. The resource was put together with expert help from teachers, has been written with national curriculum mapping for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and includes information on scoliosis, healthy bones and muscles, nutrition and healthy living. The pack contained activity sheets and a colourful information brochure that could be photocopied for pupils and formed an excellent basis for lesson plans for Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) and science subjects. We had excellent feedback from teachers, who found it a useful teaching aid. The pack is still available; if you are a secondary school teacher and would like to receive a copy of the pack, please telephone: 020 8964 5343 and leave your name and address.
In parallel with the education campaign, our former patron, the late Lord Patrick Lichfield, created an exhibition of photographs of backs. The exhibition toured the UK in the summer of 2002, and was on display again in the summer of 2003 at Shugborough, Lord Lichfield's ancestral home. Displayed in the photo gallery is a taste of our photographic exhibition; the models are celebrities and people with an interest in scoliosis who do not have scoliosis and members of SAUK who do have scoliosis.