Mental Health and Wellbeing

Schools have a central role to play in enabling their pupils to be resilient and to support good mental health and wellbeing. At Pyrcroft Grange Primary School we are passionate about developing a whole school approach to mental health and wellbeing. Our long-term aim is for this approach to be embedded within all layers of the school community.

What do we mean by mental health?

The World Health Organisation definition is,

“Mental Health is defined as a state of well-being in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully and is able to contribute to her or his community.”

Good mental health isn’t just the absence of mental health problems such as depression or anxiety. Rather, it’s the presence of positive characteristics, such as being able to cope with life challenges, handle stress, build strong relationships and recover from setbacks.

It includes the way we feel about ourselves, the quality of our relationships, our ability to manage feelings and deal with difficulties and how much meaning and joy we derive from life.

At Pyrcroft Grange Primary School we base our whole school approach to positive mental health and wellbeing on eight key areas.

· Leadership and management that supports and champions efforts to promote emotional health and wellbeing. Sue Nardoni - Senior Mental Health Lead.

· An ethos and environment that promotes respect and diversity. The health and wellbeing of pupils and staff is promoted through the ‘hidden’ or ‘informal’ curriculum, including leadership practice, the school’s policies, values, and attitudes, together with the social and physical environment

· Curriculum teaching and learning to promote resilience and support social and emotional wellbeing. Using the curriculum to develop pupils’ knowledge about health and wellbeing

· Enabling pupil voice to influence decisions.

· Staff development to support their own wellbeing and that of their pupils.

· Identifying need and monitoring impact of interventions.

· Proactive engagement with families.

· Targeted support and appropriate referral.

Our driving aim is to create a safe and calm educational environment, with clear expectations of behaviour, well communicated social norms and routines, which are reinforced with highly consistent consequence systems. The school has eleven key values that are interwoven within the school culture and support the development of pupil character.

The school role in supporting and promoting mental health and wellbeing can be summarised as:

· Prevention: creating a safe and calm environment where mental health problems are less likely, improving the mental health and wellbeing of the whole school population, and equipping pupils to be resilient so that they can manage the normal stress of life effectively. This will include teaching pupils about mental wellbeing through the curriculum and reinforcing this teaching through school activities and ethos.

· Identification: recognising emerging issues as early and accurately as possible.

· Early support: helping pupils to access evidence based early support and interventions; and

· Access to specialist support: working effectively with external agencies to provide swift access or referrals to specialist support and treatment.

What we do at Pyrcroft Grange Primary School