Wellbeing

At St Joseph’s, we are committed to supporting the emotional health and wellbeing of our pupils and staff.

We all have mental health. Our mental health affects how we feel, think and act. It refers to our emotional, psychological and social wellbeing. Our mental health can change on a daily basis and over time and can be affected by a range of factors.

It’s important to look after our mental health, as we would look after our physical health. Our state of wellbeing affects how we cope with stress, relate to others and make choices. It also plays a part in our relationships with our family, community, colleagues and friends.

When children have good levels of wellbeing it helps them to:

  • learn and explore the world
  • feel, express and manage positive and negative emotions
  • form and maintain good relationships with others
  • cope with, and manage, change, setbacks and uncertainty
  • develop and thrive.

“Just breathe. You are strong enough to handle your challenges, wise enough to find solutions to your problems, and capable enough to do whatever needs to be done.” 

Lori Deschene

At St Joseph’s we understand the significance of helping our pupils to look after their mental health and develop their coping skills in order to boost their resilience, self-esteem and confidence. This also supports them in learning to manage their emotions, feel calm, and engage positively with their education – which will help to improve their academic attainment.

Our staff understand the importance of listening to the children, helping them to express how they are feeling and give them the tools to build the resilience that they need. We champion and support mental health and wellbeing for children and staff, both strategically and practically as part of our school improvement planning.

St Joseph’s actively supports the national mental health awareness and wellbeing weeks through the course of the school year which help reinforce our philosophy. Our staff are committed to helping your children to develop social and emotional skills, providing them with the coping skills and tools they need to understand and manage their thoughts, feelings, behaviour, goals and relationships.

Click here to explore the highlights of our Wellbeing week in February 2022

Throughout the Federation, we regularly explore feelings through discussion, role play and art using a variety of literature. Books include Lucy’s Blue Day, The Dot, The Book of Hopes and The Boy, the mole, the fox and the horse. Children have the opportunity to share their ideas about change and resilience, hope and empathy in a creative way. It is in laying these strong foundations that we provide a strong bedrock of opportunities for our children the next generations of children to become happy, purposeful and resilient.

Miss R Ugbo
Wellbeing Lead


Zones of Regulation

At St. Joseph’s, we recognise the importance of promoting positive mental health and emotional wellbeing to our children and their families.

Our aim is to create an open culture around the discussion of mental health and wellbeing and to empower our children be able to regulate their emotions.

In Spring Term 2022, we started to implement the Zones of Regulation curriculum in order to help teach our pupils to identify emotions in themselves and others and provide them with bank of strategies to help regulate their emotions and improve their wellbeing.

The Zones of Regulation is a curriculum based around the use of four colours to help children self-identify how they’re feeling and categorise it based on colour.

Click here for a summary of the 4 zones

The curriculum also helps children better understand their emotions, sensory needs and thinking patterns. The children learn different strategies to cope and manage their emotions based on which colour zone they’re in.

Additionally, the Zones of Regulation helps children to recognise their own triggers, learn to read facial expressions, develop problem-solving skills, and become more attuned to how their actions affect other people.


Other initiatives

Every year we celebrate the theme of nature in the National Mental Health Awareness Week and actively take advantage of all of our outdoor green spaces as areas of learning and exploration.

We are very lucky to have two Forest Schools and learn through first-hand experiences, the wonders of nature in our own corner of the universe. In 2021, we held a nature competition (winners received a hand-signed copy of the brand new book about a bird-watching detective, ‘Twitch’, by M.G. Leonard) among the families and staff alike to share in our appreciation of the awe and wonder of God’s world.

Click here to see the photo entries for our Nature Competition

As part of National Mental Health Awareness Week in 2021, Year 1 also recorded this special song below: