Below is a small excerpt from my book ‘The Head of Year’s Handbook: Driving Student Well-being and Engagement’ which is due to be released next year. In the chapter this is taken from I explore key issues which affect student well-being before looking at how different theoretical models can be combined to create a whole school well-being model.
Improving well-being
In order to develop a clear culture of promoting student well-being it is important that you have a clear understanding of what makes up ‘good well-being’ and how it can be implemented with your year group.
The following model for embedding a culture of well-being within your year group is an adapted version of the applied model for positive education (M Norrish, Paige, O’Connor, & Robinson, 2013). It develops elements of earlier models of well-being in schools (Konu & Rimpelä, 2002) and shows how in order to experience well-being students must be able to experience and develop certain inner characteristics. The outer rings of ‘Live it’, ‘Teach it’ and ‘Embed it’ explain how you can develop a culture within your team and throughout your school to encourage student well-being.
Model for developing student well-being in schools.
Live it
Demonstrate to others what supporting student well-being is and encourage other staff to buy into and ‘live’ the fundamental elements of well-being.
Teach it
You need to be teaching the well-being skills and characteristics in any teaching time you have control over, such as in PSHE or form time activities, but also develop strategies that allow others to deliver the skills as part of the traditional curriculum.
Embed it
Embedding well-being involves its continued promotion across the school community, ensuring that clear processes are in place for staff to raise any concerns over well-being, and for any necessary actions to be taken by the appropriate person within the school such as a pastoral manager, SENDCO or safeguarding lead.
Well-being characteristics
The inner circle of well-being characteristics are what students need to experience in order to have a sense of well-being. Your job as a head of year is to ensure that your students have the opportunities to develop these characteristics. For example, publicly rewarding accomplishments for good work in a lesson allows students to experience both a sense of accomplishment and the positive emotion of joy.
Delivering a project-based group work session where students have the ability to build up new relationships and become curious and immersed in a short-term piece of work will allow the development of other key characteristics required to experience a sense of well-being.
The difficulty with the well-being characteristics is many are linked to one another so if one is not being experienced it is likely others will also be missing. Also, some characteristics such as physical health cannot be tackled by a head of year. Timely referrals to external agencies and contact with parents to raise concerns are just as important in ensuring good student well-being.
Ultimately what you should take from this new model is a set of prompts, how am I going to improve each of the individual well-being characteristics for your students?
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