At Badger Hill Primary School we are committed to supporting the emotional health and wellbeing of our pupils, families and staff and we follow the DfE 8 principles of a whole school approach to promoting mental health and wellbeing in order to help us do this. We have a Safeguarding and Wellbeing Team who work together across the school in order to support all of our Badger Hill family in different ways.

Our Safeguarding Team:

Mrs V Whittingham: Headteacher, Designated Safeguarding Lead

Mrs S Goddard: Deputy Designated Safeguarding Lead, SENDCO

Mrs S Clark: Safeguarding Governor

Our Mental Health and Wellbeing team:

Mrs Goddard: Pastoral Lead, Class teacher, SENDCO, part of the wellbeing change team

Mrs Wilkinson: Teacher, subject lead,  SMHL Lead

Mrs Ollerenshaw: Governor, parent

Mrs Whittingham: Headteacher involved in meetings, supporting decisions and inputs to staff and pupils across the school

Mrs Harland: PSHE Subject Lead

Mrs Walker and Mrs Faxon: ELSA’s in school

We know and understand that everyone experiences life challenges that can make us vulnerable and at times, anyone may need additional emotional support. We take the view that positive mental health is everybody’s business and that we all have a role to play.

We have two trained ELSAs (Emotional Literacy Support Assistants)  Mrs Walker and Mrs Faxon who support children to understand and manage their emotions in order to ensure they have a high level of well-being which enables them to succeed in school. Activities are delivered in either smaller groups, pairs or with individual children.

We follow a Growth Mindset approach which is a belief that you can develop your skills and talents through hard work, the right strategies, and guidance from others.

We use The Zones of Regulation to help us to recognise and understand ourselves how we are feeling. The zones are a self-regulation approach to behaviour that categories all the different ways we feel into different colours, which helps children to identify the way they are feeling. The goal of introducing children to the framework is to help them move towards independent emotion regulation. We learn to recognise what zone we are in, what it feels and looks like to us personally to be in each of the different zones and what ‘tools’ (strategies) we can use as individuals to get ourselves regulated in to our ‘green’, ‘calm/happy’ functioning zone.

As a whole school we regularly focus on mental health and wellbeing. This includes our weekly Wellbeing Wednesday activities in class; a focus on mental health and wellbeing during Children’s Mental Health Week; conducting pupil, staff and parent voice to gain feedback from our stakeholders and we have termly Espresso Yourself Coffee Morning/Afternoons when we invite parents and carers in to school for a coffee and a chat.