Forces Children Scotland has today (Tuesday 14 January 2025) launched a digital deployment pack to help young people overcome unique challenges of deployment.
The digital support resource has an interactive deployment rollercoaster is at its heart providing lots of information, advice, and downloadable resources to help this community to navigate and understand how they may be feeling at various points of the Deployment Cycle.
Deployment can be a challenging time, bringing feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and isolation throughout the seven stages of the cycle. Consultations led by the charity with this community, 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.
Those involved shared personal experienced of deployment to co-design an interactive digital landing page and supporting downloadable resources help alleviate challenges which can impact mental health and wellbeing, education and learning, and much more.
A young person involved in the co-production process, 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!”
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 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.
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.”
