Associates
LearnHappy is proud to collaborate with professionals and organisations who put people at the heart of what they do. This page tells you a little more about some of our closest associates. Click on the logos to be directed to the organisation websites.
Pete Kirby
A former Deputy Headteacher in the primary sector, Pete has now been working in the field of health and wellbeing for over eighteen years. He has been both an educator and the Programme Development Manager for Coram Life Education, as well as a Lead Teacher with Gloucestershire Healthy Living and Learning. He has a broad knowledge of PSHE encompassing substance misuse education, social norms and effective processes of delivery.
Pete is passionate that PSHE (or Lifeskills as he prefers to call it) is a key component of the curriculum for all. In recent years, Pete has also helped develop educational resources for Facts4Lifeand has been involved in training and supporting schools in implementing the resource and approach into their school curriculum.
Aly Thomsen
Aly Thomsen has a background in primary teaching and when life took her to Denmark, she recognised the potential of LEGO elements to offer a practical and innovative medium from which to learn. Aly was invited to join the LEGO Education Training Academy where she was introduced to products designed especially for education, ranging from simple machines through to sophisticated robotics. She trained as a Certified LEGO® Trainer before moving with her family to Colorado, USA.
Upon her return, Aly’s infectious enthusiasm for promoting LEGO led her to set up her own consultancy in the UK, where she has the flexibility to provide fun and stimulating learning experiences in which everyone can participate and achieve success.
Through her business Bricks2Learn, Aly developed “Thera-Build” a therapeutic approach based on playful, active interaction with children to improve social skills, build confidence/self-esteem, increase resilience and to promote good all round mental health through constructive play with LEGO.
More recently, Aly has has joined forces with LearnHappy to create BuildHappy, co-developing resources for exploring emotion and building resilience for youngsters. The partnership has also developed resources to support memory and meaningful interactions between people living with dementia and their families and carers.
Di Harrill MBE
Di currently enjoys a varied and dynamic role including Learning Lead for PSHE at Newent Community School, Secondary Lead for Gloucestershire Healthy Living and Learning (GHLL.org.uk), Lead Teacher for Facts4Life (facts4life.org) and general PSHE consultant. Her huge contribution to the development and promotion of PSHE themes has led to her being awarded an MBE for Services to Education.
Di’s passion and subject knowledge led to her working as an Advanced skills teacher for PSHE. This role led to Di being an integral part of the team that grew into GHLL, taking a leading role in the development of the website, GHLL Award and in more recent years, the People in the Know (PinK) Curriculum and Mental Health Champions Award.
Di has also been involved in the creation of numerous secondary resources, focusing on sensitive areas such as resilience and suicide prevention and sexual consent, delivering staff training on these and other PSHE themes.
In her role as learning lead for PSHE at Newent, Di and the department have recently been featured in two books; The School of Wellbeing – Jenny Hulme and Understanding Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education in Secondary Schools – Jenny McWhirter (Author), Nick Boddington (Author) and Jenny Barksfield (Author).
Di has also been involved in helping to develop the Dove Confident Me resources for teachers. She took part in the Women in the World conference and is featured in the teacher’s support videos on the Dove website.
