What is a Healthy School?
A health promoting school is one that actively promotes and protects the physical, mental and social health and well being of the whole school community through positive action. This includes actions on policy, strategic planning and staff development with regard to the curriculum, ethos, physical environment and community relations.
At Wood Memorial, we strive to ensure that we set challenging goals in relation to all of these areas with a view to providing our children with the best start possible in life.
Healthy Lifestyles
We believe that promoting and learning about health in Wood Memorial should be something that we all work together to accomplish. We want our children to understand the importance of why we do it and instil lifelong healthy attitudes. Healthy living is not simply something that should be taught alone within the curriculum, it should be integrated within all aspects of school life and at Wood Memorial that is our constant goal.
Our Past & Our Future
We have been part of the Flintshire Healthy Schools Scheme for over 10 years now and have strategically implemented a range of actions and interventions over this period of time that have had a significant impact upon the health and wellbeing of our school community. Last year we successfully gained the Healthy Schools National Quality Award - an immensely special accolade. It was a tremendous amount of work but we feel that it is worth the effort and we hope to be successful in our journey. We were externally verified and the report states:
Joan Roberts, lead verifier writes:
"Schools that achieve the NQA are implementing wellbeing initiatives at the very highest level.
Wood Memorial School is a truly health promoting school. It was exciting to observe at the achievement visit this manifest itself, with the involvement of every member of the school community: pupils, parents, staff, governors, families and wider involvement of the locality and outside agencies.
There is a wonderful whole school, caring and supportive ethos…it has a real family feel with older pupils supporting younger ones.
The school co-ordinator used to work with the Flintshire Healthy Schools Scheme and has brought this expertise and enthusiasm into his role in the school. The Headteacher is very supportive of the aims of a healthy school, as it is clear that her passion is to support the health and wellbeing of pupils, their families and to provide a health promoting workplace for all members of staff. In turn, the staff have enthusiastically taken on their role as role models to support the health and wellbeing of all.
It is very clear that pupils take an active role in all aspects of school life and fulfil their role with great confidence and enthusiasm. Head boys and girls, school council, sports leaders, junior leaders, e-cadets and the eco-committee all have an important leadership role in school. Woody Family Group and parent forums provide the means to ensure parents and carers can influence practice in school too. Having two enthusiastic and skilled members of the governing body with a health and wellbeing/health and safety brief ensures a proactive involvement in the leadership of this area in school.
Structures have been established that allow the views of all to be gauged: school and class councils, the confidence of pupils throughout the school to know that their individual voices will be heard, Woody Family group, supportive and interested governors and hardworking and passionate staff. All have a vested interest in ensuring that the importance of health and wellbeing is embraced by all. With this in place health promoting initiatives thrive.
The very skilful Family Liaison Officer provides a friendly and approachable link, not only to all aspects of school life but also to agencies beyond the school, which can provide broader support if needed. The family group that we had the privilege to observe seemed not only to provide support for parents/carers, but also a very effective forum to ensure their voices are heard and fed into school life.
The overriding highlight was to see the way in which all members of the community fully embrace the healthy schools approach, to make it such a clear whole school approach. In all action areas this meant there was some excellent practice.
Specific highlights include the exceptional whole school approach to the support of the emotional wellbeing of the school community, which provides the structure to daily life within Wood Memorial. This supports all pupils including, but certainly not exclusively, those with particular needs.
The strength of the approach to positive relationships and emotional health provides the firm foundations to feed into the SRE in school. The other building block of school life, which relates to the safeguarding of the pupils, provides another. Linked to this has been developed a strong spiral curriculum, through the foundation phase and key stage 2.
The many opportunities the pupils have to be active is an outstanding feature in the school.
