Personal Success and Mental Health

Promoting Pupils' Personal Success and Mental Health 

At The Meadows, one of our aims is to help our children to be personally successful. We know that strong academic achievement goes hand in hand with positive wellbeing. We actively promote positive mental wellbeing with our children because we know that this is essential for academic achievement. Mental ill health can have a significant impact on a person’s achievement, wellbeing, and health. As a result, we are committed to working with our pupils and families to provide timely support and accessing to the expertise of appropriate services.

Our Wellbeing Team

Mrs Kuffour - Senior Mental Health Lead

Mrs Davies - Mental Health Lead

Mrs Panagi - Mental Health Lead

At school, we work with our children to help their personal development and promote positive wellbeing through:

• Our ambitious and inclusive curriculum, where personal development is an integral, interweaving thread (for information about our 'Personal Success and Wellbeing' Curriculum, please see our curriculum map, here)

• Teaching and learning that promotes self-regulation and the development of social and emotional literacy

• Dialogue with and support for our pupils (e.g. nurture)

• Our restorative approach to behaviour management

• Pupil leadership, including our wellbeing monitors

• The use of external emotion coaches from VIP

• The use of the online platform Zumos

• Whole school and class assemblies

• Through our reading approach

 Every day, our pupils come into school and have one-to-one time with their teacher to scale how they are feeling. This daily dialogue helps our children to feel recognised, to develop their social and emotional language and it also helps our teacher to triage and address any worries or concerns they may have, putting immediate support into place. We use Zumos to help us do this, which all children have access to at home. 

 This year, across the school, we have enhanced our approach to supporting self-regulation and emotional literacy by launching our new ‘Red 2 Blue’ approach. This is an approach that has been launched across The Shaw Education Trust family. Our Mental Health leads, Mrs Davies and Mrs Panagi, have completed their coaching qualifications and are leading the implementation across the school.

What is the 'Red 2 Blue' approach? 

The 'Red 2 Blue' approach is designed to help children to recognise and manage their feelings so that they can focus on the things they need to be doing, like their learning. We recognise that where our attention goes, our energy follows. Certain feelings can stop us from focusing on the things we need to be doing for example, feeling worries, anxious, upset, overly excited, angry or nervous. Whilst these are normal emotions we all experience at times, they can be unhelpful because they can divert our attention and energy away from this things we are supposed to be doing.

When we are feeling these emotions, we refer to them as our ‘Red Head’ state. Having a ‘Red Head’ might make us feel:

• hot • uncomfortable

• not ourselves

• distracted

• not able to concentrate

Having a ‘Red Head’ might make us:

• Act aggressively (shouting, pushing, shoving)

• Say, “I Can’t!”

• Say, “I won’t!”

• Use unkind words

• Do and say things we don’t mean

We are working with the children to help them to know the tools and techniques they can use to move from red to blue. When we have a ‘Blue Head’ we can concentrate. We might feel cool, calm, clear and aware of what we have got to do. Also:

• • We will say, “I will try!”

• • We will say, “I will do!”

• We control our actions and our words and make good choices. 

Moving from Red to Blue is a choice, and sometimes we need strategies to help us. We are working with the children to choose some techniques to help them to regulate their emotions and move to Blue.

Mental Health

Looking after our wellbeing is so important and there are lots of free and meaningful ways we can do this.

The ‘5 Ways to Wellbeing’ is an evidence-based framework that promotes our positive wellbeing. It is widely used in the NHS to promote mental wellbeing and we can use it to help us too in school and at home.

Here are the five top tips you can use to support your wellbeing:

Here is a list of some of the ways we are helping promote positive wellbeing in school in these five areas: