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Health and Wellbeing

Enhanced Healthy Schools Status

In March 2021, we retained our Enhanced Healthy School status. This means that we make a commitment to our children to help them grow into healthy young adults.

 

With this in mind, we focus on the following areas to promote a healthy lifestyle;

  • Creating a whole school ethos and values that underpin healthy living

  • Working with parents and carers to support and inform

  • Giving our parents and children a voice

  • Making sure our children behave well

  • Developing strategies for anti-bullying and making these child-friendly

  • Keeping our children safe, in real-life situations and when online.

  • Creating enrichment opportunities to give life experiences

  • Engaging third parties to supply further opportunities for our children for example Southend United Football Club

  • Celebrating successes whenever we can

  • Getting the children physically active as often as possible

  • Caring for our environment

  • Provide healthy, hot school meals in a social eating environment

  • Promoting healthy drinks and snacks brought into school for example, water and fruit

  • Working with outside agencies and services to offer support for vulnerable families

  • Building the PSHE, RSE, PE and computing curriculums to support all of the above

 

Emotional Health and Wellbeing Status

We are very proud to have had our school recognised as an Enhanced Mental Health and Wellbeing School in 2021.

The emotional wellbeing and mental health of all our pupils and staff is of paramount importance to us. We continually review and make necessary alterations to our practice to ensure that the curriculum firstly meets the needs of the pupils but additionally that staff are given appropriate training to spot signs, enabling them to take steps to support our pupils.

We aim to ensure that our staff have a good work/life balance and know how to access support should they find their own mental health or emotional well-being is ever affected.

As part of the 18 month long, Emotional Well-being and Mental Health project we took opportunities to;

  • Hear staff, pupil and parent views of our school.

  • Take actions to address any concerns for example, children told us that they didn’t attend clubs outside of school, so we facilitated more after school clubs.

  • Train our staff to deal effectively with issues affected by Mental Health and Wellbeing concerns.

  • Train 2 staff as accredited Youth Mental Health First Aiders.

  • Set up new interventions and support for children struggling with Mental Health and Wellbeing.

  • Review our PSHE and RSE curriculum.

  • Develop our playtime activities and organisation for example, the development of play leaders.

  • Work with our local community

  • Let children experience wellbeing activities for example, yoga, outdoor learning and daily exercise, music and dance.

  • Support the mental health and wellbeing of our staff

“Our overall aim at Friars would be to support our children, parents and staff to be in control of their thoughts and feelings while equipping them to cope with life's challenges, keeping problems in perspective and bouncing back from setbacks. Being part of this project will help us continue to support our whole school community to become emotionally healthy” 

Mr. S. Roche, Former Vice-Principal

We like to think of Friars as being a very caring and nurturing school and this is embodied in the work that we do. Participating in the Emotional Well-being and Mental Health Project has not only helped to develop our existing practices but it has also enabled us to branch out and do more. We will continue our work with gusto! 

Mr. C. McClay, Principal

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