Wellbeing and Mental Health

At Listerdale Junior Academy we are aware that a child’s emotional health and well-being influences their cognitive development and learning, as well as their physical and social health and their well-being in adulthood.

What is wellbeing?

An overall sense of wellness will not be achieved without having a balance in these key elements:

Physical: This includes lifestyle choices that affect the functioning of our bodies. What we eat and how active we are will affect our physical wellbeing.
Emotional or psychological: This is our ability to cope with everyday life and reflects how we think and feel about ourselves.
Social: This is the extent that we feel a sense of belonging and social inclusion. The way we communicate with others, our relationships, values, beliefs, lifestyles and traditions are all important factors of social wellbeing.
Spiritual: This is the ability to experience and integrate meaning and purpose in life. Achieved through being connected to our inner self, to nature or even a greater power.
Intellectual: It is important to gain and maintain intellectual wellness as it helps us to expand our knowledge and skills in order to live an enjoyable and successful life.
Economic: Economic wellness, in short, is our ability to meet our basic needs and feel a sense of security.

It is about our thoughts, feelings, emotions and ability to react to life. Even when we are met with a challenge, good wellbeing gives us the ability to cope. Sometimes our wellbeing is affected by daily pressures and sudden changes in our lives, such as: an illness, family situations and changes to our normal day to day routines like schooling which we are experiencing through the Pandemic at present.

When our wellbeing is affected, we find our feelings can get out of control, which will lead to sudden spurges of, sadness, anger, depression and we find that we cannot cope with normal daily routines.

Wellbeing at Listerdale

Our aims in school are to ensure that through the promotion of positive emotional health and wellbeing, children are helped to understand and express their feelings, build their confidence and emotional resilience and therefore their capacity to learn. To increase the awareness and understanding amongst children, staff and parents/carers of issues involving the emotional health and wellbeing of young people and to provide support at an early stage to anyone who is or appears to be suffering from mental health issues.Mrs Hodges is our Senior Mental Health and Well-being leader.

Our school ethos is that we have a high expectation of all and for all - and in relation to mental wellbeing this means that we expect that every member of our school community should feel that they belong, are listened to and are valued. We listen carefully and we walk! We encourage and enable our pupils to be able to discuss their emotions without feeling stigmatised or embarrassed.

Throughout the school week, children have many opportunities to talk about how they are feeling and any worries they may have.This can be expressed through access to a calm quiet space in school, emotional check in cards, through RSHE lessons, high quality books, Assemblies, Art, PE, playtime and a variety of other ways through children’s everyday learning.

We celebrate and acknowledge Children’s Mental Health by coming together at different times of the year such as Hello Yellow Day in October and National Children’s Mental Health week in February.

Please click on the images below to download useful supporting documents and activities as well as links to websites to help support our work towards keeping our children’s minds healthy and supporting parents.