How to Run a Successful Wellbeing Day in School: Planning and Execution Tips

Kerry Bridges has been the Mental Health and Wellbeing Lead at Archbishop Temple Church of England High School in Preston, Lancashire since 2021 but part of the Pastoral and Safeguarding Teams for a great deal longer. She is happy to talk about supporting wellbeing in schools all day long and has a particular interest in staff wellbeing.

In this series of 4 blogs, I will talk about one of the things we do in school to support our children’s wellbeing in the hope that there is something here you can use or adapt. In my last blog, I talked about structuring the day around the NHS 5 ways to Wellbeing. You can read on to find out how we pulled the day together.

I had managed to speak to a few of our local friends who had said they were willing to help me out and I knew that I wanted to run 5 sessions around the 5 ways to wellbeing. I sat down to think about how I could use those sessions to put together a cohesive day.



As we are a Church of England School, it seemed natural to get everyone connected by starting the day with a collective act of worship. In this, I was enormously fortunate to be able to work with a good friend of mine who had previously worked as our school chaplain. Reverend Joe is not only a fabulous vicar, but he knows how to keep children’s attention. He was kind enough to say he would be happy to lead the worship for us.

If you are not in a church school, you will not have collective worship as we do but I am sure you have assemblies or some way of getting groups of children all together. If you can find an inspiring speaker like Reverend Joe, or someone who knows how to engage your young people, I am sure that you will be able to get a connection going.

For giving to others, I turned to the charities that our children are supporting. We have a year group attached to each charity, and we asked them to come in and speak to the children about the work that they can do with the money we raise. Again, if you don’t already have named charities, perhaps you could use the day to launch something.

Giving to our charities led nicely to “Be Active” as we decided to complete a sponsored walk around our school site. We are lucky enough to have some beautiful grounds and a good deal of outside space, but you don’t need much. Our children completed laps of the school and collected sponsorship based on how many they completed.

This left two sessions to be run in classrooms by form tutors, and in my planning, I tried not to put these as consecutive sessions, even if that meant they were either side of the lunch break. I understood that asking the staff and students to stay together in the same room for two hours is not conducive to positive wellbeing for anybody.

Session four was “Mindfulness” and for this we based the session on Michael Rosen’s book “Write to Feel Right”.

(https://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/portfolio/write-to-feel-right/). I had heard Michael speak and been blown away by his brilliance. When I had read this book, I knew it was the one for our special day.

Finally, we looked at “Learn something new”, and for this the form group came into their own. With plenty of notice, I asked form tutors to ask their form about their gifts and talents and what they felt they could teach to each other. In some forms the adult was the teacher, but in many others the pupils took complete charge. It is safe to say that everyone came away having tried something at least a little bit out of their comfort zone.

So, everything was in place, and we were all set to go. I just needed it to go to plan...