Raising Mental Health Awareness with eLearning
We worked with 1st4sport and Mind to develop a mental health awareness elearning course designed specifically for sports coaches.
Raising awareness
Despite high-profile mental health awareness campaigns and much media discussion in recent years, there are still many misconceptions about the issue, and some stigma around discussing it openly. Exercise can help to maintain good mental health, but unfortunately, mental health problems can create barriers to joining in with sports and physical activity.
1st4sport are a leading provider of training for sports coaches in the UK. Working with Mind, the mental health charity, they commissioned us to create an online mental health awareness course to help sports coaches to better understand the subject so that they feel more informed and confident about making their sessions more inclusive and supportive to all their participants.
The challenge
The training course covered areas including understanding mental health and misconceptions, recognising the barriers to participating in physical activity, and being confident in having conversations about mental health; not the easiest topics to address in an online context.
As one of the UK’s leading mental health charities, Mind have a very strong and recognisable brand, so we had to keep consistent with their visual identity and tone of voice.


The Can Do
We took a story-based approach with the course content, including user stories, scenarios and case studies wherever possible.
This helped to put a human face onto the potentially challenging material we were covering to encourage empathy and understanding from our learners who represent many forms of activity represented in the course including wheel-chair basketball, football, netball and yoga to name a few.
The outcome
Within a month of launch, the course had a 5-star rating on our client’s learning portal. Here are some things our learners said about the course:
- “Great informative course, allows you to learn productively and put the knowledge into real world situations you may come across.”
- “Very good course with lots of information, it’s made me more confident in dealing with and recognising signs in mental health.”


- “I loved how easy it was to navigate around the training. The training was very in-depth, and I enjoyed the challenges and the use of case studies to link it back to a participant rather than continuous reading on the matter. Thank you.”
- “Excellent resource and educational tool. Very helpful with advice and strategies for starting conversations regarding mental health.”
The client verdict
“I am delighted that we selected Day One to work with us on our latest eLearning project for Mind, the mental health charity. They were receptive to suggestions and highly professional in the way that they incorporated sensitive case studies, scenarios and user stories to bring home the key messages in a mental health awareness eLearning project.
Following the recent public launch, we received overwhelmingly positive learner feedback and Day One’s contributions and collaboration have played a significant part in this.
Working in partnership with Day One has been a very positive experience.”
JOHN CLARK
Head of Learning & Assessment Services, 1st4sport Qualifications

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