Wellbeing – a hallmark of education?

As a leadership team at Stamford School, we work hard to promote the wellbeing of our pupils in all aspects of our school life.  Although as school leaders we are held accountable to this by the ISI inspection framework, we place such an important emphasis on wellbeing as our experience shows us that young people flourish when both the academic and the pastoral elements of their education are holistically interwoven.

To try and emphasise the importance of wellbeing being at the heart of all that we do as teachers, I often show my colleagues a stick of rock, which conjures up childhood memories of trips to the seaside in the UK. One of the unique features of a stick of rock is that if you were to cut through it at any point, the pattern embedded throughout the length of the rock would always be visible. In the same way, I try to impress upon my colleagues that if you were to take a snapshot of our school life at Stamford in any particular moment, you might observe many different kinds of lesson or activity taking place but ultimately it is the focus on the wellbeing of our students which runs through the depth and breadth of all that we do.

So, what does it look like to try and ensure that wellbeing runs through everything that we do as a school? In Stamford, we are still learning how to answer this question ourselves and do not believe that we are yet experts in this field! However, we have been hugely helped in the last twelve months by developing the concept of a ‘Pastoral Curriculum,’ which dynamically interacts and complements our academic curriculum. Whereas previously in our Senior Schools, teaching or interventions relating to the wellbeing of students used to come under the remit of PSHE, we now seek to actively recognise that every part of our school life that in some way contributes to wellbeing. For example, in anti-bullying week this year, all pastoral activities were centred around the theme of making a noise against bullying. This included anti-bullying assemblies, lessons, tutor times, whole school campaigns such as wearing odd socks and even a chapel service for each year group on being an active bystander.  The conversation was continued further by our student support managers, school marshals, teachers and the students themselves who were keen to make their own views heard.  It was exhilarating to see the whole school putting wellbeing so prominently on our agenda.