The Challenge

When Abi Edmunds and Fathima Ashraff-Ali first connected in June 2024, they shared a clear vision. Abi was looking to support a local college by introducing a wider range of Social Media Resilience’s offer, with an emphasis on embedding our data-driven foundations to create lasting change.

As Mental Health Lead at Solihull College & University Centre, Fathima spoke openly about the everyday challenges her team was facing. A significant number of the pastoral and mental health cases they supported were linked to the online world. Social media was not just a backdrop to these problems, but a clear contributing factor in the lives of many students.

Across the college’s three campuses—Blossomfield, Woodlands, and Stratford-upon-Avon—the impact was clear. Students were struggling with body image, comparison, low self-esteem, decision-making under pressure, and emotional stress related to what they were seeing and experiencing online.

The conversation started, as many do, with concern. The need for support was obvious, but the right strategy was less certain. What would actually make a meaningful difference for students?

As Digital Wellbeing Week 2025 approached, the college wanted to move beyond awareness campaigns. Fathima made it clear that online safety alone wasn’t enough. What students needed was education, perspective, and tools to help them think differently about their relationship with technology.

They were looking for something more thoughtful and more transformative. Not just advice to be cautious online, but a shift in how young people and their educators understood the emotional and psychological impact of digital life.

This wasn’t simply about screen time. It was about the growing confusion and pressure students felt, and a slow erosion of clarity and confidence in how they saw themselves.

In response, Solihull College invited us to deliver a programme designed to meet that deeper need. One that would give students meaningful insight into the way social media affects their thinking, emotions, and self-image - and provide practical tools to navigate it with greater awareness and control.

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Our Approach

Ahead of the delivery, a selection of workshop themes was carefully tailored in collaboration with the mental health team at Solihull College. The goal was to ensure students would not only understand the online pressures they face but begin to develop the practical skills needed to manage them.

To inform the process, the Social Media Resilience IndexTM was sent out in advance. This tool invited students to reflect on their digital habits and emotional responses, generating a visual profile that provided valuable insight into their individual experiences. The data helped shape delivery and ensured the workshops met students where they were, rather than where adults assumed they might be.

Over three days, more than 500 students from the Blossomfield, Woodlands, and Stratford-upon-Avon campuses took part in an immersive, skills-focused programme. Each session was designed to do more than raise awareness. The emphasis was on layering in moments of challenge, reflection, and insight—offering students new ways to think, feel, and act in response to their digital world.

The workshops helped students begin to:

• Recognise the psychological impact of scrolling and comparison
• Reframe body image and self-worth away from external validation
• Understand the mechanisms of influence behind the content they consume
• Build emotional language around stress, anxiety, and decision fatigue online

The sessions included:

• The Power of You – Supporting students to explore how social media affects self-image and how to reclaim personal confidence
• Critical Thinking Online – Unpacking how algorithms, attention tactics, and digital echo chambers shape beliefs
• Understanding Social Media’s Influence – Helping students identify emotional triggers and learn strategies for more intentional use

Each session invited students to actively engage with the material—through breakout groups, creative reflection, and structured discussion. The goal was to offer tools that many adults only discover through years of lived experience.

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What We Did

The programme was delivered across three full days, with sessions running at each of Solihull College’s campuses—Blossomfield, Woodlands, and Stratford-upon-Avon. Workshops were scheduled throughout the day to allow students from a range of departments and year groups to attend without disrupting the rhythm of teaching and support.

Each session lasted approximately 50-60 minutes and was delivered in a format that blended guided learning with active participation. This included:

• Short, accessible teaching segments
• Visual storytelling and real-world digital examples
• Group discussion tasks
• Creative reflection and written exercises
• Interactive polling.

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The delivery was designed to feel calm and focused, supportive rather than overwhelming. Where possible, workshops were kept small to allow for richer interaction and ensure each student had the space to engage.

Abi led the sessions directly, adapting tone and pace to suit each group. Her facilitation brought clarity, warmth, and expertise to a topic that can often feel emotionally charged and uncomfortable.

The college provided dedicated spaces for delivery and ensured strong communication around the schedule, allowing the programme to run smoothly across all sites. Staff supported the sessions and took away resources to support continuity in conversation beyond the day itself.

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The Impact

By nature of delivering wellbeing workshops within the flow of students’ regular routines can be a challenge, especially on tough topics. Schedules are tight, energy levels vary, and emotional bandwidth is often stretched. But at Solihull College, the engagement across all three campuses was striking.

Despite the demands of the week, students showed up fully. They listened, reflected, and shared—often with honesty.

Many were already aware of the ways social media was affecting them. One student admitted their screen time was over 70 hours a week. Another shared that they had previously deleted social media apps for a month, only to find themselves pulled back in without knowing how to sustain the change. These weren’t disengaged students. They understood the problem. What they lacked—like so many of us—was a clear reason to change, and a strategy they could actually stick with.

That’s where our trainings made a difference.

Rather than prescribing rules or relying on shock tactics, the sessions offered both the why and the how. Through calm, emotionally attuned delivery, students were shown how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours online are connected and how small shifts in awareness can lead to big changes in mindset and habit.

The impact wasn’t just in the room, but in what was taken away. Students left with:

• A clearer understanding of the psychological design of social media
• New language to describe digital stress, comparison, and attention fatigue
• Tools and frameworks for building healthier boundaries on their own terms

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The Social Media Resilience approach doesn’t ask students to disconnect from their digital world. It helps them learn to live healthily with it; to build agency, embed personal boundaries, and develop the mental skills to navigate a world that doesn’t pause for them.

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Staff who attended the sessions echoed the value of the delivery.

As Fathima Ashraff-Ali, Mental Health Lead at Solihull College, reflected: “The workshops were absolutely fantastic, in many different ways. Not just the content of the workshops, which were very relevant to our student population but also for the staff.”

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Looking Ahead

Solihull College is now exploring how to expand this approach into future cohorts and staff CPD, embedding social media literacy and mental fitness into their wider wellbeing provision.

This collaboration marks a powerful shift from reactive safeguarding and awareness workshops to proactive measured approach to digital wellbeing & resilience.

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