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By Mark Campion, HMI
Blog post |
How can schools help pupils to be healthy and happy?
Bullying, obesity, domestic violence, poverty, social media, cancer, sex, disability… the list of issues that can affect children and young people’s health and wellbeing goes on. How do good schools support their pupils’ health and wellbeing?
Healthy and happy
In June 2019, our ‘Healthy and happy’ report explored the impact that schools in Wales have on pupils’ health and wellbeing. We found that twice as many primary schools as secondary schools were supporting pupils very well.
The report covers many of the issues already mentioned at the start of this post that affect health and wellbeing. However, there is a very important headline message to the report that mustn’t be lost amongst discussions about the individual issues schools need to have a ‘whole-school’ approach to supporting pupils’ health and wellbeing.
A whole-school approach
What do we mean by this? It’s that schools need to make sure that everything about the school gives a consistently positive message to pupils.
Let’s think about what happens when there isn’t a whole-school approach. Here’s a few examples:
- lessons about bullying lose their value if pupils aren’t happy with how the school deals with allegations of bullying
- learning activities around healthy eating have little impact if the food served to pupils, and the dining experience don’t promote healthy eating
- posters promoting exercise won’t make much difference if the school doesn’t provide enough time for pupils to be active.
In short, the everyday experiences of pupils in school have the greatest impact – positively or negatively – on their health and wellbeing.
What can be done?
The best schools are very good at supporting pupils to be happy, healthy and safe. They have a whole-school approach to health and wellbeing which include the following features:
- policies and practices that ensure pupils make good progress in their learning
- leaders who ‘walk the talk’ about supporting pupils’ health and wellbeing
- a nurturing culture, where positive relationships allow pupils to thrive
- an inclusive community and ethos
- detailed knowledge about pupils’ health and wellbeing that influences policies and actions
- an environment and facilities that promote good health and wellbeing, such as space to play, socialise and relax at break times
- a broad and balanced curriculum that includes evidence-based learning experiences that promote health and wellbeing
- supportive pastoral care and targeted interventions for pupils that need additional support
- effective links with external agencies
- close partnerships with parents and carers
- continuing professional learning for all staff that enables them to support pupils’ health and wellbeing.
Although our ‘Healthy and happy’ report is about pupils’ health and wellbeing, it’s worth noting how important it is that schools look after the health and wellbeing of their staff too. We know that happy staff are more productive, and pupils are more likely to be happy if the staff are happy.
Our report features many brief case studies of good work in primary and secondary schools across Wales. It also looks at what schools can learn from research and evaluates a lot of specific work on health and wellbeing in our schools. The recommendations in the report should influence how schools develop their practice.
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