Over the course of their education, children spend over 7,800 hours at school.  With such a huge amount of time spent in the classroom, schools provide an ideal environment for promoting good emotional wellbeing and identifying early behaviour changes and signs of mental distress. The social and emotional skills, knowledge and behaviours that young people learn in the classroom can help them to build resilience and set the pattern for how they will manage their mental health throughout their lives.  Emotional wellbeing is a clear indicator of academic achievement, success and satisfaction in later life. Evidence shows that mental health and wellbeing programmes in schools, can lead to significant improvements in children’s mental health, and social and emotional skills. Wellbeing provision in schools can also lead to reductions in classroom misbehaviour and bullying

At St Augustine’s we take emotional health and mental well being very seriously.  St Augustine’s is now registered with Mentally Healthy Schools to access a wide range of useful resources and materials to support good mental health for both pupils and staff.

Every class provides a wide range of activities that promote emotional health and mental well-being including the daily mile, Worry Monster's/Boxes, class and team building activities. Every week we have two phase assemblies which look at aspects of our Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural place in our community and the wider world and the Personal, Social & Health Education of our children.   In the Autumn and Summer terms, we devote a 5 week block of lessons about topics which are agreed with our Mental Health & Wellbeing Council and in the Spring term we hold a Mental Health & Wellbeing week.