Running a Wellbeing Day in School: Tips for Planning a Successful Event

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 running 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. Last time, I wrote about the importance of choosing which services to work with. This time, I will tell you about how that helped me to begin planning the day.

I had come away from the initial meeting brimming with enthusiasm. I knew that I really wanted to take full advantage of the day we had and that the focus should be on Wellbeing rather than on Mental Health. Although teaching our pupils about how to look after their mental health is a big part of what we do, it is my ambition that we are able to work on prevention. Our role in education should be to show our pupils how they can take steps to keep themselves as well as they can, both physically and mentally, but that even if they have a diagnosis of mental illness there are still things that everyone can do to support their wellbeing.

In the UK we are amazingly privileged to have open access to research based healthcare via the NHS. In our school, we focus on using commissioned services as I said in my last blog, and where better than the commissioners themselves? Since we have 5 lessons in a day, it seemed to lend itself perfectly to focusing on the NHS 5 ways to wellbeing: 5 steps to mental wellbeing - NHS (www.nhs.uk)

The 5 steps are:

1)  Get Connected

2)  Give to Others

3)  Mindfulness

4)  Be Active

5)  Learn Something New

Our 5 year groups also each have a charity that they are fundraising for and, from this basic idea, I started to think about how I could bring all these things together.

However, there was no chance that I would be able to do this on my own. I wanted our children to have an amazing day, but I also wanted it to be manageable for our staff. I knew that spending all day in form groups could be challenging for everyone. Of course, it was important that they did spend some time in forms, but I wanted to break up the day too. I started to think about our friends in the community who might be kind enough to help us out.

As a Church of England School, we are fortunate that we have many links with our local churches. One of our local vicars is a very close friend of our school as he started out as our School Chaplain, and I was fairly sure he would be happy to help us out. If you are not a Church school, there are bound to be similar people in your community who will be happy to help.

If not, perhaps you have parents or carers who could support you. I have always found our community amazingly supportive. I have found that it only takes one person to come on board and others will follow. 

In the next blog I will talk I will talk about how we came together to plan the day.