The Media Initiative for Children (MIFC) has been developed by Early Years – the organisation for young children and is a comprehensive training programme for pre-school practitioners and teachers. It combines cartoon media messages around diversity with an early years programme. Together they aim to promote positive attitudes to physical, social and cultural differences amongst young children, practitioners and parents. The messages also address bullying behaviours.About the Rural Respecting Difference in the Education Sector Project
This is a two project and is a partnership between the Rural Development Council (RDC), Early Years and the Border Counties Childhood Network (BCCN). The project has currently trained and supported 60 primary schools and after schools settings across Northern Ireland and the border counties of Ireland in the Media Initiative for Children Respecting Difference Programme and supplied these 60 schools and after schools settings with MIFC Resource Boxes.
A new message has been developed to support the implementation of the programme in a developmentally appropriate manner for school age and after school age children. This latest episode follows the same format as the previous messages and the themes of the programme, but this message introduces a brand new setting from a rural perspective. The new message features many aspects of rural living while highlighting the importance of farming life, shared education, and sporting and community activities. The cartoon and characters reflect the diversity and vibrancy of rural living.
New resources have been developed as part of this new message and these will further support teachers and practitioners to implement a respecting rights culture within the classroom and after school setting, to create a respecting difference environment where there is a culture of listening to young children and adults can pick up on opportunities to discuss diversity issues using appropriate adult/child interaction strategies.
Early Years is seeking to appoint a suitable company/organisation to both provide these new resources and to distribute them to the 60 schools and after schools settings, who are currently participating in the programme.
Early Years will provide the necessary artwork and designs for these resources if successful, along with the artwork for any other design work. 80 sets of the new resources are currently required.
The training in the MIFC Programme has been carried out since February 2013 and the current resource boxes have been distributed to participating schools and after schools. Therefore tenders must be able to have the content produced and ready for distribution by 10.10.2014 to be distributed to the schools and after school settings before mid-term break.
The successful tender will also be expected to store any unused resources until the end of the project, and distribute these in batches when required, before 30.10.2014.
An initial meeting will be held with the successful tender organisation week beginning 20 August 2014 to discuss the various elements of the assignment including production of the resources, storage and distribution requirements.