‘Kindness is free, sprinkle that stuff everywhere.’

At Berrow Primary Church Academy, we aim to promote positive mental health and well-being for our whole school community (children, staff, parents and carers). We understand the importance of positive mental health and understand that this is just as important as physical health.

Our role in school is to ensure that children are able to manage times of change and stress, and that they are supported and can access help when they need it. We are striving to ensure that children learn what they can do to maintain positive mental health, what affects their mental health, how they can help reduce the stigma surrounding mental health issues, and where they can go if they need help and support.

Children and young people may experience a wide range of social and emotional difficulties which manifest themselves in many ways. These may include becoming withdrawn or isolated, as well as displaying challenging, disruptive or disturbing behaviour. These behaviours may reflect underlying mental health difficulties such as anxiety or depression, self-harming, substance misuse, eating disorders or physical symptoms that are medically unexplained. Other children and young people may have disorders such as attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder or attachment disorder.

As a school we  ensure that Social, Emotional and Mental Health is at the heart of our school. We aim to support children in recognising their emotions and develop strategies to regulate their emotions and have a toolkit of calming activities. We ensure that we enable children to have the time and space to regulate their emotions and practice de-escalation strategies to enable them to be  ‘Ready to Learn’. We have dedicated staff who have accessed a range of training opportunities to embed interventions such as Thrive and Forest School.

We support children’s mental health in school in a number of  ways:

All our staff support children’s wellbeing through strong caring relationships and our child centred positive behaviour policy.

Our Learning Mentor, who is our senior mental health lead, works closely to support children’s emotional needs.

Our PSHE lessons support emotional well-being and encourage children to learn about physical and mental health.

Learning mentor is ELSA trained offering nuruting SEMH support. 

Calm club/ Forest school/ nurture  and wellbeing groups at lunchtime / gardening club

Active play leaders and playtime buddies support relationship building during breaktimes