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Hamsters, swings, slides, lunch boxes, crayons, school computers – the list of things your child touches in a single day is pretty long. In fact, our research shows this can be as many as 700 items in one day. To ready children across the nation as they returned back to school in September, we launched a handwashing programme, Soaper Heroes, to bring fun hygiene lessons to the classroom and in doing so educate our nation’s children on the importance of washing your hands to keep themselves and others safe.
Global Handwashing Day – Soaper Heroes, Assemble
Each year on October 15th 200 million people worldwide celebrate Global Handwashing Day. As a founding partner of the Global Handwashing Partnership, this has been a day of great importance to us. Since 2008, we have achieved Guinness World Records for handwashing, kickstarted hygiene programmes and made as much an impact possible to support Global Handwashing Day.
This year in the UK, we will give a lesson on hand hygiene in the biggest nationwide assembly. 375 schools and over 100,000 children across the UK will learn the role handwashing plays.
The Bigger Picture – Why Handwashing Education Matters
To illustrate why our children should be learning not only how to wash their hands, but when and why; take a look at the life-size flat-lay** that features every item the child has touched in a day. It quite literally gives us the bigger picture. We followed 3 children as they go about their normal life and captured all the items, they touched in a 24-hour period. One child touched 186 items. It makes complete sense to really drive the importance of hand hygiene education in schools.
Lifebuoy School Programme – Let’s Keep Little Hands Clean
Teaching our children why handwashing matters is vital and with 60%* of UK parents wanting to see more hand hygiene education in schools, we went to work. We’ve partnered with primary schools across the UK to spread good hand hygiene messages and provide the necessary resources to make sure little hands are staying clean throughout the day.
The schools programme includes all learning materials, videos, songs and science experiments for teachers to use to help teach children about why good hand hygiene matters, when are the key moments to wash or sanitiser hands and how to do it thoroughly. We’re calling our students, Soaper Heroes!
Around the world we have managed to teach life-saving lessons about hygiene to over 1 billion people and with 4,000 schools signed up to our programme in the UK, we’re ready to reach the next 1 billion. Schools can sign up to our programme and become a Soaper Hero today.
Introducing Our Hand Hygiene Coalition
We’re extremely proud to announce the creation of our Hand Hygiene coalition. Members include The British Psychological Society, The Global Handwashing Partnership, Royal Society for Public Health, Parent Kind and more. The coalition will develop educational material that will roll out in selected primary schools in the UK from November 2020, eventually reaching up to 2,000 primary schools by the beginning of 2021!
When it comes to our nation’s children, there’s nothing we will stop at to make sure we’re not only teaching them the importance of handwashing but making it fun whilst instilling good hygiene habits. Because a Lifebuoy lesson is a lesson for life.