The 111 Files: More than a physical workout

In just over two weeks, 25 very proud and exhausted students from Western Heights High School will complete the latest CACTUS course in their school.

It's a course that sees 25 students three mornings a week complete a gruelling physical fitness session, run by the Western Heights Neighbourhood Policing Team.

Just before 6am, along with parents and teachers from the school, we train together in the morning before school and for the past six weeks this has been their life.

The CACTUS course runs for eight weeks, and stands for Combined Adolescent Challenge Training Unit and Support. It is a very intense, strictly disciplined, physically demanding course which challenges the beliefs, thoughts, attitudes and behaviours of youth through physical fitness.

In trying to evaluate why any teenager would want to get up at 5am three mornings a week to come to this course is beyond the comprehension of most people, and if you think most teens are too lazy to get up at 5am, think again.

Nearly all CACTUS students, if given the chance, would do it all again in a heartbeat. Whatever their reasons for wanting to do this course (it's purely voluntary) once they are in an environment that has strictly enforced boundaries, it shows them how to set and achieve goals, get physically very fit, and teaches them about personal responsibility. They don't mind the hard work one little bit, in fact they thrive on it.

They thrive on the feeling of belonging, the feeling of achievement and the feeling of being fit.

Being a positive role model has played a massive part in the success of this programme, but being a positive role model is not a role that is reserved for those running these types of programmes. Positive role models set boundaries, enforce those boundaries with consequences and as a result influence the decisions youth make. What you do as a parent and the way you behave everyday shapes and forms the beliefs that your youth will take into their futures.

Sergeant Steve Sutton is the officer in charge of the Neighbourhood Policing Team at Western Heights and CACTUS programme co-ordinator.