At our school, we place great importance on children's mental health and wellbeing. We believe that happy, confident children learn best, and we are committed to creating a safe, supportive environment where every child feels valued and heard. Through a range of activities, from Restorative Practice and developing emotional literacy using the Zones of Regulation, to regular opportunities for play and creativity, we help children build resilience, express their feelings, and develop strong, positive relationships. We also work closely with families and outside professionals to ensure each child gets the support they need to thrive both inside and outside of the classroom.
What is Mental Health & Wellbeing?
Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood to adolescence and through to adulthood.
Our Whole School Approach is underpinned by our commitment to ensuring that everyone in our school community is actively involved in children's mental health and wellbeing. Our Senior Mental Health Lead - Mrs Greene, works in conjunciton with the Headteacher - Mrs Houston, our Learning Mentor, Wellbeing Governor and our newly appointed Wellbeing Ambassadors to deliver an effective Mental Health Strategy.
St Mary's 5 Pillars of Wellbeing
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St Mary's is launching the 5 Pillars of Wellbeing to support children's understanding that our actions can boost our emotional and mental health: Connect with others, Be Active, Take Notice of the world around you, Keep Learning and Give to others.
These 5 steps help children to build resilience, and promote their overall sense of wellbeing.
Each half-term during the academic year 2025-26, we will be focussing on one wellbeing pillar. Our Wellbeing Ambassadors, along with the Senior Mental Health Team, will bring these strands to life. Each pillar is reinforced through our school values and ethose, along with our curriculum design and opportunities for pupil wellbeing and fulfilment.
Why is it important?
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What Does our Approach to Whole School Mental Health & Wellbeing look like?
We regularly review our offer to ensure that all of our pupils are receiving the best support. Our annual wellbeing surveys inform our next steps and shape our School Development Plan. We are ambitious and forward-thinking and utilise the resources from within our Local Offer, and aim to build a strong connection with all of our stakeholders so we can enable all children to flourish. Please see our Whole-School SEMH Support Plan below.
Mental Health and Wellbeing Week 2024
During the Mental Health Week 2024 our children learnt how to give CPR through the 'Little Life Savers' organisation.
In addition, the children took part in focussed Circle times during PSHE, to look at this year's theme of 'Know Yourself, Grow Yourself.'
We used our Circles to talk about our emotions in age-appropriate ways, and explore the tools we can use to express our emotions openly.
Using the Place2Be's resources we looked at the importance of self-awareness and expressing our emotions. We explored these themes through different activities and during worship time.
In addition we were able to benefit from the power of moving our bodies by taking part in a whole-school skipping challenge and workshops. In face, the skipping ropes have been so popular, our breaktimes and lunchtimes are now very full of new skipping tricks and demonstrations of resilience.
Zones of Regulation - Emotional Literacy
At St Mary's we support children's emotional intelligence and ability to learn self-regulation strategies and tools through the use of the Zones of Regulation.
Each pupil learns about the Zones of Regulation in their PSHE learning during the autumn term from EYFS. We hold annual workshops for our new families in the September of each year.
Children access their Zones of Regulation 'Working Walls' in their classrooms daily to check-in. Children alert the adults looking after them, as to how they feel at different stages throughout the day. Adults can then respond to individual children's needs, or promote their use of self-regulation strategies.
As part of the Zones programme, we proactively teach children how to identify their 'zone/state', and the specific emotion(s) they are feeling. Children refer to these initially as, 'red, yellow, green, or blue zone' feelings. Children's ability to describe their emotions grows with their development, so that they can become further precise in labelling their feelings, explaining why they feel this way, and later developing independent strategies to support their emotions.
Within the school children move to create their own 'Zones of Regulation toolbox', which helps them identify personal strategies to move from one zone/state, to the next.
Zones of Regulation is our common language at St Mary's for helping children identify their emotions, grow greater awareness and understanding of other people's emotions, and recognise that all emotions are typical and accepted. By doing so, we share a whole-school approach of recognising emotions as a healthy response to different situations, and develop more effective ways for children to regulate so that they can have successful social interaction, develop greater problem-solving and resilience and achieve increased self-esteem and satisfaction in all areas of their lives.
The Zones of Regulation approach underpins our therapeutic response, as it forms the basis of 'behaviour is a form of communication'. From this understanding, we can develop a more holistic response to how children can develop healthy and life-long strategies for mental health and wellbeing.
Restorative Practice - Developing relationships and empathy
Restorative thinking can be simply explained through five key themes identified by Belinda Hopkins (2011):
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Theme 1 Understanding that everyone has their own unique and equally valued perspective
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Theme 2 Knowing that thoughts influence emotions and emotions influence actions (Think Good - Feel Good)
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Theme 3 Having and showing empathy and consideration
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Theme 4 Identifying needs and unmet needs
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Theme 5 Supporting a culture of collective responsibility for problem solving and decision making
Restorative practice guides our relationships, language and behaviours. Restorative practice influences the way we communicate; facilitates a better understanding of our triggers and behaviours; guides how we respond to challenges and how we both prevent, and manage, conflict.
The aim of restorative practice is to develop positive relationships; deepen our understanding of behaviours; and to manage conflict and tensions by repairing harm, creating a culture for positive mental health and well-being and for engagement with teaching and learning.
Restorative practice and ways of thinking are developing and growing in many primary, secondary and special schools across the UK. An increasing amount of evidence demonstrates a positive impact on mental-health and wellbeing, behaviour, attainment and satisfaction.
Speaking in a restorative and relational way means:
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showing empathy and being attuned to the otherperson
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being as neutral as possible
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using non-judgemental language
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using solution-orientated language if problemsolving is needed.
Speaking in a restorative way requires a great deal ofself-awareness to avoid slipping into the language ofopinion, assumption, or judgement.
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Circles play a central role in restorative practice.
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Circles change the relationship dynamic; they create equality, giving everyonean equal voice and the opportunity to be heard.
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Circles have a wide variety of purposes: relationship development; sharingideas; generating support; decision making; problem-solving.
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Circles offer an alternative, contemporary classroom and meeting process.
Circles are held at least twice a week in all of our classrooms. Circles are used for a multitude of purposes, including problem-solving, pre-empting an upcoming situation, discussing scenarios that are pertinent to the children's wellbeing, building relationships and currency and creating a positive classroom climate.
Our children say:
“It is a good thing because it helps people learn.”
“We all have time to ask questions, and find out moreabout each other.”
“They are used to help express ourselves.”
“They stop us worrying about a situation.”
“I enjoy having them because I get to learn things about people I wouldn’t know otherwise.”
“It helps keep me clam and listen carefully.”
How Can We Help?
Helpful Links:
The West Sussex Single Point of Access (SPoA) is a dedicated service which provides a simplified single route to access specialist emotional wellbeing and mental health support. The SPoA helps direct you to the right service, eliminating the need to refer to multiple services.
Led by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, the service is delivered in partnership with West Sussex County Council's Youth Emotional Support Service (YES) and YMCA Dialogue.
e-wellbeing is the digital front door for West Sussex SPoA. Visit the e-wellbeing website for more information.
https://www.sussexcamhs.nhs.uk/our-services/service-finder/west-sussex-single-point-advice-spoa
Relationships
Use these links to help you access support with relationships.
https://www.supportline.org.uk/problems/relationships-and-family/
https://www.familylives.org.uk/advice/your-family/relationship-advice/
_20250826141428156.png?width=1920&height=1080&scale=LIMIT_MAXSIZE "Copy of Copy of Wellbeing Ambassadors (1)")
If you would like to discuss any worries you may have about your child regarding their mental health and wellbeing please contact your child's class teacher in the first instance, who can then work with you and your child alongside our Inclusion Leader and Learning Mentor.
If you or your child's mental health is placing you in an emergency situation, you can:
1. Call 999
2. Call Child Line on 0800 11 11
3. Call The Samaritans on 116 123
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Here are some additional links to websites that you may want to investigate and share with your child if you have concerns, or would like some support with emotional wellbeing and mental health:
https://www.annafreud.org/mental-health-professionals/our-help-for-children-and-families/
https://www.childline.org.uk/toolbox/calm-zone
https://www.gingerbread.org.uk/
https://www.mentallyhealthyschools.org.uk/
https://www.nhs.uk/oneyou/every-mind-matters/
https://www.place2be.org.uk/our-services/parents-and-carers/
Mind West Sussex have some online courses that may be of interest, many are free:
https://www.westsussexmind.org/training-courses/online-training/our-courses-on-eventbrite
Financial Well-being
These links will help you find some support for financial needs or worries you may have.
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/debt-and-money/
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/benefits/
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2020/03/uk-coronavirus-help-and-your-rights/