Mental Health and Wellbeing

‘Mental health is a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realise their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community.’
World Health Organisation (WHO)

In an ever-changing world, positive mental health is key to everyone’s well-being and quality of life. It allows us to respond effectively to the challenges that daily life brings. At St. Margaret Clitherow’s Primary school, we are passionate about making a difference to the lives of young people. We seek to ensure that every member of the community can believe and achieve by working together. We are all aware that mental health is key to believing and achieving and we are committed to ensuring that an ethos of positive mental health and well-being is at the heart of all that we do.

We foster a culture of teamwork: working with each other, with the wider school community and most importantly with the young people in our school. Whatever issues our children, their families, the school, our team, or the community face, we are committed to supporting everyone to making a real positive difference to their lives. We believe that a resolution to any issue begins with a conversation and so we encourage all members of our school family to talk openly about issues that they may be facing so that we can work through them together. This is reflected in our school mission statement, with an emphasis on loving and protecting, aspiring, achieving and praising God – and in our overarching motto that, ‘Jesus is at the heart of everything we do.’

Aims and Objectives

• To have a whole school approach to promoting positive mental health and wellbeing
• To ensure that, through the promotion of positive mental health and wellbeing, our children are helped to understand and express their feelings, build their confidence and emotional resilience and therefore their capacity to learn and achieve
• To increase awareness of mental health and wellbeing among staff and develop an understanding that we are all responsible for playing a part in establishing a supportive environment
• To increase the awareness and understanding and reduce stigma amongst children, staff and our wider community of issues involving the mental health and wellbeing of young people and to provide support at an early stage to any child who is or appears to be suffering from mental health issues.
• To ensure that, embedded within our curriculum, we are enabling our children to become healthy, independent, responsible, and confident members of society. Children will understand how they are developing personally and socially and many of the moral, social and cultural issues that are part of growing up will be discussed. They will be provided with opportunities across the curriculum to learn about rights and responsibilities and to appreciate what it means to live and thrive as part of a diverse and tolerant society.