21st June 2024
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
Honywood has always been committed to supporting the whole child and although we appreciate the need to strive for excellent exam results we have always tried to balance this with the wellbeing of our learners. Keeping learners safe and striving for happiness and success both during their time with us and beyond into their lives ahead is essential. I am very proud of our staff and the caring nature of our school where meaningful relationships and personalisation are embedded into all aspects of school life. The current mental health picture highlights the need for these unique aspects of our school more than ever and I am confident that the ethos of Honywood will continue to support our learners moving forward into whatever challenges the following year brings. Mental health and wellbeing of our learners is of the utmost importance and we are fully aware of the impact this has on a young person and how this can then have an effect on their learning. We recognise that all learners in our school deserve a universal offer to support their mental health and wellbeing. We are always looking at ways in which we can increase this offer to reach and impact on a greater number of learners across all cohorts. Much of the pastoral care we have been providing historically has been reactive, responding to crisis situations. At the end of last term we launched the YouHQ app with cohorts 7, 8, 9 and 10 to provide a way to flag issues earlier. Every time a learner logs into the app it asks for a snapshot of their mood. A low mood triggers a request for a check in with their learning group leader. The app is also able to signpost learners to courses that they can complete, which are gamified to pay out coins which the children can use to update their avatar. Every two weeks the app requests a world health organisation designed survey. The survey asks learners to scale how they have felt around five areas of their wellbeing. The information from the app supports us to provide targeted wellbeing interventions and will provide data to assess the impact and effectiveness of these interventions. We are able to personalise the
app with our own bespoke signposting to our in house pastoral care. There is a chat function that sends emails directly to safeguarding@honywoodschool.com. This is an email account monitored by both Mrs Nichols and Mr Smith, our designated Safeguarding Leaders. We appreciate that day-to-day different things affect how a learner is feeling. The current snapshot of the ‘mood’ and wellbeing of our learners is as follows:
There are multiple reasons why a learner may not be feeling good and many of these can go unnoticed or be masked. Our aim is for this system to support learners to share how they are feeling in a non-judgmental way. Each low mood alert directs an email to the learning group leader to check in with any learner who has a low mood that day. The check in requests also go directly to safeguarding@honywoodschool.com. Here is a snapshot of WHO 5 wellbeing survey results for the last half term: