Brook Learn

Brook is the leading young people’s sexual health and wellbeing charity. They provide free and confidential services for almost 250,000 young people in the UK every year, as well as sex and relationships education (SRE) and training in a range of settings.

Sending their staff to run Brook education sessions with young people in schools can be very effective. However, many schools and organisations struggle to find funding to provide this opportunity to young people.

Brook wanted to increase their overall reach of school support, ensure a consistent message was being delivered to all sites, whilst further promote and build awareness of their organisation.

Taking about sex and relationships with young people is not always easy. Staff running sessions in schools often discovered that the teachers themselves found the topics embarrassing to discuss and were reluctant to get involved.

It is vital to ensure the conversation comfortably continues outside of these allocated session and therefore Brook saw the need to arm staff with the tools and skills to confidently run these sessions themselves.

To solve this issue, our aim was to design and develop a suite of high quality elearning courses to empower, support and encourage teachers in delivering effective SRE. These would all sit within a branded Brook Learn platform for users to access materials at any time.

We began with two key courses; “How to Deliver SRE” and “Relationships and Enduring Love?” (in partnership with the Open University).

Instructional Design

Tapping into Brook’s 50 years of experience in discussing sexual health and relationships with under 25s, our team acquired an in-depth understanding of the selected topics and how to present ideas for their target audience.

Getting the tone and language of the modules right was key to ensure we presented Brook as both experts in their field whilst being a fun, friendly and approachable service. A conversational, and friendly tone therefore helped set the scene engaging classroom sessions and encourage the break-down of barriers between teachers and students.

The 3 P’s

For the “How to Deliver SRE” course, we identified three key stages to which content should be formatted: “Plan” (preparing your session), “Play” (delivering your session) and “Prove” (evaluating your session). This concept was then mapped across to the topic modules, to ensure the user could follow a familiar, linear format.

Learn It / Teach It

For the “Relationships and Enduring Love?” course, we developed six separate modules with two parts: “Learn It” and “Teach It”.

The “Learn It” section would act as an interactive knowledge-base for the user. Whilst, the “Teach It” section would arm them with everything they need to conduct the classroom session itself. An introductory dashboard, outlined the time, format and checklist for the activity, with a bank of downloadable resources, followed by a step-by-step guide.

Design

We developed a fun template design, to reflect Brook’s bold branding, with a common interactive interface, including a help button and popup “A to Z of SRE” glossary.

All graphic design in the course was custom built. We incorporated effective elements of Brook’s branding and online presence, including their bright colour scheme and sketchy illustrations, alongside custom illustrations, icons and transformed complex information into clever infographics.

Where possible we developed engaging user interactions, such as clickable case studies, mini quizzes, drag and drop activities, reflective exercises.

Throughout the content, we embedded pointer buttons for hidden top tips on key topics. This enabled information to be layered, allowing the user to design their own journey and choose to delve deeper into topics of specific interest.

Photography was taken from a fantastic shoot with Jose Matos depicting real life and relatable relationships with young couples.

All associated resources such as downloadable factsheets, activity sheets and classroom resources were all further designed in harmony with the course, to deliver a fully cohesive brand and product for the user experience.