Introducing The Whole Student Programme ©

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I am pleased to introduce ‘The Whole Student Programme’ ©. This is a health programme I have developed to provide holistic health and wellbeing support to students aged 12-19 to help them prosper in health, life and in their learning.

We integrate an in-depth holistic healthcare approach, scientific assessment and screening, with wise counsel, coaching and pragmatic interventions.

The programme is led by Founder, Charlotte Fraser BA Hons, Dip. NNP, Dip. AIT, an award-winning nutritionist and holistic health practitioner. Charlotte also works in close partnership, with Sarah Morris and Carmen Beyxer at Emerge Be Who You Are. Nutritionist Virginia Hills DipION, mBANT, CNHC is also on the team.

Sarah and Carmen are qualified NLP Master Practitioners, Hypnotherapists, and Life & Resilience Coaches. Sarah and Carmen can further support students in making any sustainable lifestyle changes, to improve their wellbeing, and to facilitate and build personal development, growth and resilience.

 

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In devising this programme, we consulted many parents, teachers, schools and health professionals. It is the culmination of many years working in nutrition, holistic health and teaching, also our own experience as parents. The Whole Student Programme © aims to join the dots and to fill a big gap… a genuine need. Yes, there’s been lots of talk about ‘Holistic Education’ and the need for a ‘Whole Child’ curriculum. However, has there been a service available to students, parents and teachers that offers a truly holistic approach to the health and wellbeing of students?

The Whole Student Programme © works with individual students, parents, schools, SENCOs, and other educational experts to improve the health and wellbeing of the student both in and outside the classroom. With so many health problems often taking root in adolescence, the programme also has a strong emphasis on health prevention.

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We are proud to also be working in collaboration with Think Healthy Me, an organisation committed to delivering personalised, high quality, sustainable health and well-being benefits for everyone.

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What inspired The Whole Student Programme ©?

There has been an increase in emotional and mental health issues in teenagers in recent years. While Covid-19 has been a catalyst, anxiety and depression were on the rise even before the pandemic. And while there’s been a growing tendency to label, diagnose and over medicalise children, we now see teenagers increasingly self-diagnosing and identifying within mental and emotional health groups.

50% of all mental health problems start at the age of 15.

Source: The Children’s Society

According to The Children’s Society, in the past three years, the likelihood of young people having a mental health problem increased by 50% . Now, five children in a classroom of 30 are likely to have a mental health problem. 75% of young people with mental health problems aren’t getting the help they need. 34% of those who do get referred into NHS services aren’t accepted into treatment. More than two thirds of young people would rather access emotional and mental health support without going through their GP.

Where should parents look for help for their children in this situation? What if your student is suffering from anxiety in school? Or what if your child thinks that they have ADHD like their school mate? All too often, the SENCO is working with a four-month backlog on two days a week. A GP referral can take months. Where do you go for support or for that initial assessment? Or, perhaps you have seen a consultant already and they want to prescribe medication. Is medication your only option, or is there a more natural treatment path?

This is where The Whole Student Programme © comes in.

For more information, visit: The Whole Student Programme’ ©.

Objectively Quantify how Nutrition and Lifestyle Improve Brain Health

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Aside from feeling better, there is evidence of significant improvement in brain and cognitive health when you change your diet, improve sleep, and increase your fitness.   Reducing symptoms associated with stress, anxiety or depression can also make a huge difference!

Working with Creyos Health, I provide clients with a science and evidence-based means of quantitatively measuring how changes to your diet, sleep, and fitness routine can positively impact brain and cognitive health.

An engaging and scientifically-validated cognitive assessment

As well as understanding how your brain is functioning, you will be able to track how the changes you are making are impacting your brain.  Importantly, you will be able to visualise improvements with objective and quantifiable information, presented in an easy to understand format. Brain health integrates very much with gut health and provides a great indicator of your overall health and wellbeing.

You can take the Creyos Health cognitive assessment as a one-off to get a snapshot of your brain health in any point in time. However, you will get far deeper insight if you take the assessments over a series of weeks or months; this enables us to determine meaningful change. 

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Who benefits from doing this cognitive test?

Everyone can benefit. It is especially helpful to those who want to track whether making the smallest changes to their diet, their sleep routine, or increasing their fitness levels, makes a difference to their brain health and overall wellness. 

The Creyos Health test facilitates a highly personalized approach to healthcare. It provides useful biomarkers to enable you to take a proactive and preventative approach to optimizing your health and wellbeing.  I further support you with a nutritional and wellbeing programme tailored to your individual needs. We adapt this as required, during the course of the Cognitive Health programme and based on your test findings.  

The Creyos Health Test is not a diagnostic tool. However, it may be useful to clients with ADHD, Autism, Depression, Dyslexia, and Cognitive Impairment who wish to monitor progress from nutritional and other lifestyle changes.

What does the Creyos Health assessment entail?

Clients complete a series of fun and engaging neurocognitive tasks online, either during the consultation, or remotely, at home.  

You can relax because this isn’t an IQ test. We aren’t measuring IQ!

The tasks assess aspects of cognition including reasoning, memory, attention and verbal ability. 

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You are anonymously assessed against a sample of healthy control subjects.   We factor in your age and gender.

Creyos Health maintains a global normative database of more than 75,000 participants (built off of a larger database of 7 million+ completed tasks). This allows for detailed comparisons of individuals to specific populations. 

On completion of the assessment, I share your individual Creyos Health report and we discuss nutritional and lifestyle strategies for improvement. We schedule further tests at agreed intervals to monitor progress and assess meaningful change.  

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About Creyos Health

The Creyos health tasks were developed in the laboratory of Professor Adrian Owen OBE, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging (owenlab.org). Over 300 scientific studies have been run to date using the Creyos Health tasks, yielding numerous publications in leading academic journals. 

The tasks were validated in studies of patients, brain imaging studies of healthy volunteers and in several large-scale public studies involving tens of thousands of volunteers. They have proven to be efficient and sensitive measures of baseline cognitive capacity. For example, in one study, the results of the 30-minute Creyos Health battery were comparable to those of a standard 2-3 hour (paper and pencil) neuropsychological battery (WAIS-R) (Levine et al., 2013). In another recent study of mental capacity in the elderly, the CBS battery outperformed a standard task of cognitive abilities (the MoCA) (Brenkel et al., 2017). Finally, performance on the CBS battery is highly predictive of reasoning and problem solving abilities, as indexed by “classic” tasks such as Raven’s Matrices and the Cattell Culture Fair task (Hampshire et al., 2012). 

How do we measure Meaningful Change?

The Meaningful Change Indicator compares the difference in an individual’s performance on any given task between two time points to the variability in repeated measurements that would occur in the absence of meaningful change. The latter is estimated from a sample of healthy control subjects. The reliable change index uses the test-retest reliability and the standard deviation of scores (measured in a control sample) of a task to describe the range of possible differences that occur in repeat task completions. If an individual’s change in performance from one time point to another is much larger than what is expected due to chance, then one can conclude that there was meaningful change. 

Assessing meaningful change requires data to be obtained in a control sample. Creyos Health has a database of over 8 million test scores, and their normative database consists of more than 75,000 individuals. The interval between self-administered repeated assessments ranges from less than a day, to more than a month. This massive database allows Creyos Health to characterize in the general population how performance on every task fluctuates naturally across a range of intervals. Creyos Health is therefore able to quantify the bounds of what constitutes a meaningful change for every task.