WELS news

A homeschooling project, lead by WELS academics and geared towards inspiring hope and celebrating Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) diversity, has been awarded funding from the OU’s COVID-19 Rapid Response fund.

Dr Verina Waights, in collaboration with Willen Hospice, has received funding to enhance the use of technologies in a hospice; piloting and evaluating the use of digital technologies to enhance communications for service users and their families during the pandemic.

Joe Hanley, Social Work Lecturer, is leading a project to support social workers during the pandemic, piloting free online CPD to rapidly upskill social workers.

Dr Mathijs Lucassen, in conjunction with Professor Louise Wallace and Dr Raj Samra, has been awarded a grant from the Public Health Intervention Development (PHIND) Scheme to co-design an online rainbow wellbeing toolkit to promote wellbeing and resilience in LGBTQ+ adolescents.

A group of colleagues from the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics (LAL) has developed a free toolkit, ‘Moving your language learning online’ which has received a Best Open Educational Practice award by GO-GN.

​Health and Social Care graduate Jo had to leave school after her O-Levels, to help support her family. Following a conversation with a colleague, she was inspired to pursue an Access course with the OU, which she describes as a 'game-changer'. She shared her OU journey with us. 

​A research project, led by Professor Kwame Akyeampong, which takes a play-based approach to learning to improve education in early years education in Africa, has received $500,000 CAD in funding.

Two reports on the effect of COVID-19 on people with learning disabilities launched on 10 December. Carried out by the Social History of Learning Disability (SHLD) research group with the Faculty of WELS) the research focuses on lessons learned during COVID-19 that can help shape how support for people with learning disabilities can be better organised and better funded.

For Grief Awareness Week 2020, three academics from the School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care (HWSC), Dr Kerry Jones, Dr Sharon Mallon, and Dr Erica Borgstrom, came together to explore experiences of children and young people’s death anxiety as a result of COVID-19, the impact of the pandemic and death on staff working in care establishments, and how grief was reported in UK newspapers.

Dr Mathijs Lucassen is supporting updates to an existing digital therapy program in order to better support the mental health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/trans, intersex and questioning (LGBTIQ+) youth.