How can schools help pupils to be healthy and happy?

Healthy and happy

In June 2019, our ‘Healthy and happy’ report explored the impact that schools in Wales have on pupils’ health and wellbeing. We found that twice as many primary schools as secondary schools were supporting pupils very well.

The report covers many of the issues already mentioned at the start of this post that affect health and wellbeing. However, there is a very important headline message to the report that mustn’t be lost amongst discussions about the individual issues schools need to have a ‘whole-school’ approach to supporting pupils’ health and wellbeing.

A whole-school approach

What do we mean by this? It’s that schools need to make sure that everything about the school gives a consistently positive message to pupils.

Let’s think about what happens when there isn’t a whole-school approach. Here’s a few examples:

• lessons about bullying lose their value if pupils aren’t happy with how the school deals with allegations of bullying
• learning activities around healthy eating have little impact if the food served to pupils, and the dining experience don’t promote healthy eating
• posters promoting exercise won’t make much difference if the school doesn’t provide enough time for pupils to be active.

In short, the everyday experiences of pupils in school have the greatest impact – positively or negatively – on their health and wellbeing.