Frequently Asked Questions

Melva is mental health education through storytelling for children 7-11years old.

MELVA is an award-winning creative, web-based programme, designed to improve children and young people’s knowledge and understanding of wellbeing. It teaches life skills to keep well and supports the development of resilience pathways, positive emotional responses, enriching relationships, and thoughtful decision making.

Through creative storytelling, engaging characters, and practical activities, children learn alongside Melva about how to recognise, understand, talk about and manage their mental wellbeing and deal with their ‘worrits’

It’s a fun, high impact way to deliver RSHE curriculum AND can be used to creatively enhance and supplement The Thrive Approach. It can also be used towards evidence for the Carnegie Centre of Excellence for Mental Health in Schools’ School Mental Health Award and as evidence for Arts Award Discover and Explore.

As of November 2023, it is estimated that at least 1 in 5 children aged 8-25 are likely to have a diagnosable mental health condition. That’s an average of 6 per classroom!

It has never been more important for us to find new ways to talk to and teach children about mental wellbeing from an early age. MELVA is a practical, revolutionary way to do just that and is an impactful investment into mental health education

The MELVA programme focuses on early intervention for children aged 7—11 (Key Stage 2), using recognised and recommended mental health first aid strategies, communicated in a child-friendly and accessible way.

MELVA is for all children, not just those who are struggling. It focuses on teaching children the basic skills and understanding they need to keep themselves well, whatever challenges they might face in the future; supporting them to develop resilience pathways and positive emotional responses and relationships.

However, delivery settings may choose to deliver Melva as a targeted intervention with a specific group of children.

Melva is designed for young people aged 7-11 (Key Stage 2 in England and Wales, or P4/P5/P6/P7 in Scotland).

However, Melva is also being used in SEND settings with learning disabled older children. Whilst Melva has been designed with different KS2 year groups in mind, the content is suitable for all and can be adapted for your settings needs.

Note: Some of the language used in the game may seem advanced for Lower Key Stage 2 (P4/P5). Throughout the Melva programme, we’ve tried to balance the content so that it will appeal to both the upper and lower end of this age range – inevitably this means not everything will land with every child the same way, but this will not hinder their experience.

You will receive a unique school login for the full MELVA online portal, where you will be able to access to:

• 3 different MELVA programmes– series of animations, a feature film in 5 episodes and a choose your own adventure game, with wrap around activities and lesson plans. Each programme is designed to be delivered over 8 lessons and adapted for different age groups.
• A bank of extension activities and themed assemblies
• The MELVA Teacher Area, housing all necessary resources, evaluation documents and admin guides.
• A simple evaluation report at the end of the year produced by Mortal Fools (subject to proper and full completion and submission of evaluation requirements).
• Access to our MELVA Educator Community and teacher support – including teacher CPD sessions, wellbeing resources, networking opportunities, optional support from Melva team via digital drop ins, on hand email support and more!

School licenses last until the end of the academic year in which they were purchased and will renew automatically at the start of the following year unless cancelled, with invoices issued in July. If you purchase a license towards the end of an academic year e.g. Summer Term, we will liaise with you directly to discuss your license start date.

Family licenses do not expire, but are limited to 4 user profiles and once the game has been completed, it can’t be restarted.

Community or non-academic group licenses will be agreed on a case-by-case basis.

A MELVA license is £750 for the first year and then renewed at £600 per year annually, unless cancelled.

Teachers and mental health workers in schools/education settings.

We have designed the programme and teacher support to enable and empower teachers to deliver Melva in their setting. Each element of the programme is designed to be delivered over 8 lessons and adapted for different age groups, each has its own wrap around activities, lesson plans and resources.

With statutory services in such high demand, it is falling to schools to support children with their mental health, in place of trained mental health practitioners. We know this can come with its own anxieties and challenges, especially when considered alongside the epidemic of stress and burnout that teachers and school staff are already facing.

With this in mind, we have also deliberately factored staff support into the programme.

You absolutely do not need a creative background to deliver Melva.

The whole point of Melva is that it is a ready made resource which explores difficult topics in a fun and creative way – meaning we have done the designing, so you don’t have to!

Whilst we are a theatre company by nature, the programme itself does not rely heavily on drama based activities – it is more focused on engaging young people in the stories and characters. The activities are fun and practical, but they do not require any experience in drama or art.

Yes! Some of our MELVA settings are also Thrive settings. MELVA can be used to creatively enhance and supplement The Thrive Approach.

We onboard schools across the Autumn term – once you have purchased MELVA, our Schools Liaison Officer will reach out with information about onboarding, a date for your digital welcome session and the timetable of teacher CPD and support.

Your school login details will normally have been sent directly to the person in your school who registered for the Melva licence – this is usually a member of Senior Leadership or the Mental Health Lead in the school.

If you are having trouble with your Melva online login, or nobody in the school has a record of these, please contact melva@mortalfools.org.uk and we will endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible and get your up and running.

The best way for schools to access Winnie’s Breathing Exercise is to log in to The Quest for Barnabas Boggle programme.

Once you are logged in, if you skip ahead to any level from Level 2 onwards by changing the URL (e.g. http://game.melva.org.uk/levels/3/), you can then use the menu button in the top left corner to click Visit Gideon’s Office. This will take you to Gideon’s office where all the activities & videos are available in the safe on his desk.

More details and explanation about this function is provided in in the admin guide/levels checklist available in the Teacher Resources above.

The Quest for Barnabas Boggle is the only part of the Melva programme where you need to set up an individual login – everything else is accessed through your shared school login.

The reason for this is so that individual classes and young people can save their progress on the game.

We know this sounds a little silly, but 99.9% of the time, this will be occurring because you are not visiting the correct URL.

Before reaching out to us, please double check to make sure you are attempting to access the correct site by manually typing the following URL: digital.melva.org.uk (no www. at the start).

If you are still getting an error message, contact us on melva@mortalfools.org.uk and we’ll try get to the bottom of it for you. 

In the Teacher Area of the portal.

Scroll down past the Resources Section and you will see purple section which says Evaluation Forms. 

What we need: We don’t need to see the children’s individual assessment responses; what we need is your teachers ratings. You’ll need to review the children’s responses, and the give them a rating against the two criteria specified for that programme (this is usually one criteria about general understanding, and one criteria about a specific learning area for the programme).

You can then use the excel template provided (in the Evaluation Resources) to add your ratings for each individual student, which then gives you an average rating for the class.

This is what we ask you to submit to the portal – the overall class rating (and you have the option to upload the excel spreadsheet too for the detail behind it which will mean we can provide a more detailed analysis in your evaluation report).

Note: For all evaluation questions, we really recommend having a good read of the Evaluation Guidance document, as this should have everything you need.

MELVA specifically links to the following elements of the RSHE curriculum:

Legislation: Physical Health and Wellbeing

• Topic: Mental Wellbeing
• Topic: Physical Health and Fitness

 Legislation: Relationships Education

• Topic: Families and People Who Care For Me
• Topic: Caring Friendships

MELVA is story-based and creative by nature, which means it can also help you tackle other areas of the curriculum which don’t directly link to RSHE, such as comprehension, writing composition and spoken language. And our extension activities and suggestions also provide lots of different ways that you could incorporate the MELVA content into your literacy work.

Our MELVA information pack goes into more detail.

Absolutely! We have a wide range of Teacher CPD sessions available for schools at an additional cost. You can download our Teacher CPD offer HERE.

To cancel MELVA, you should email our School Liaison Officer Rachel.Robson@mortalfools.org.uk and we can confirm cancellation. You will still have access to MELVA until 1st August of that year.