Welcome to the Brighter Thinking Pod from Cambridge – the podcast that brings you advice and conversation from authors, teachers and academics.
Today, we’re going to be taking a closer look at student wellbeing in schools and how you can create a wellbeing framework for your class. Along the way, we also discuss the importance of considering oracy and resilience in this. We also explore the development of our new primary and lower secondary curriculum and resources. Although the focus of this episode is on primary and lower secondary level, there are tips in here that teachers of all ages can use.
Creating a Wellbeing Framework in your School
Our host for this episode is Tamsin Hart. She is joined by four special guests.
Dr Ros McLellan is an Associate Professor in Teacher Education at the University of Cambridge.
Pauline Stirling is a freelance education consultant and author from the Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary Wellbeing teacher’s resources.
Dr Irenka Suto is the Head of Assessment and Research at the Centre for Evaluation & Monitoring at Cambridge.
Sarah Nelson is a curriculum expert with over 15 years of experience in education, working on the development of Cambridge programmes and on global education reform projects. She is the Curriculum Lead at Cambridge for our Primary and Lower Secondary Wellbeing programme.
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What do we mean when we talk about wellbeing?
Sarah Nelson: So I think if I was talking about wellbeing in the terms of curriculum, we divided our wellbeing curriculum (primary and lower secondary) into three different strands. We’re looking at understanding myself, my relationships and navigating my world. And the reason that we think of wellbeing in these three strands is that we want to give learners the opportunity to explore wellbeing from a personal, interpersonal and global perspective.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. And Irenka, what is your take on wellbeing?
Irenka Suto: Well, I think all of the areas that Sarah mentioned are really, really important. I think of wellbeing as being about how we feel and how we function. And in the research that I’ve drawn on, which is Ros’s research, we’ve thought about wellbeing as being about how we feel and how we function. And that can vary from context to context. So how we feel in education in the school environment and how we function there and how we perceive ourselves to be doing can be very different to how we feel and how we feel we’re doing in our home lives.
I think there are really four important areas of wellbeing. There’s our life satisfaction, there’s the absence of negative emotions, there’s our interpersonal wellbeing, it’s all about relationships as Sarah says, and then there’s perceived competence. Do we feel we’re fulfilling our potential and doing as well as we possibly can?
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. It seems pertinent to move to Ros now as your research was mentioned.
Ros McLellan: Yes, I would entirely agree with what Irenka has said. There’s a very important distinction, I think, between these affective dimensions, the feelings, which is often called hedonic wellbeing, and then how we function, whether we can reach our potential, whether we have meaning and purpose in life, and these sorts of things, which is often referred to as eudaemonic wellbeing. But this can encompass things like the interpersonal, the competence and so forth. So the different dimensions Irenka was talking about.
And I also agree with you, Irenka, that there is an important distinction, I think, between thinking about wellbeing as a kind of global phenomenon that affects us in everything we do, but also thinking about the different context of our life, which, of course, for adults can be quite different for young people, because as adults, we are in workplace settings, whereas young people, of course, are in schools. I’m sure we’ll talk a little more about that in due course.
Tamsin Hart: Absolutely, thank you. And Pauline, what would you like to add about wellbeing?
Pauline Stirling: I think quite simply, wellbeing is about being comfortable, healthy, happy or just feeling well as Irenka said, both physically and mentally. It includes being able to manage stress and difficult situations about being resilient. And I think in a school setting, wellbeing is a state in which learners can go about their daily lives, play, socialise, learn effectively in order to develop their full potential, whether that potential is socially, academically, in sport, or musically. And wellbeing at school means feeling safe, valued, respected, and being actively and meaningfully engaged in extracurricular and academic activities.
Wellbeing in a school setting
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you very much. A very holistic view of wellbeing there. Now, we’ve talked about wellbeing generally. What do we mean when we talk about wellbeing in a school setting? Let’s come back to you, Pauline, for that.
Sarah Nelson: I think we can say from the description we’ve just heard around this feeling and functioning that what that means for each individual is going to look slightly different. And so we’re thinking about what that means within a school. But I think we’re still looking at that holistic attitude towards health and happiness within that particular context. And in terms of that holistic approach, we’re thinking about physical health, emotional health, their interpersonal relationships, their cognitive development and what that looks like for each individual.
And so just to kind of refer back to what I mentioned earlier in terms of the curriculum, that’s why we’re looking for that personal, interpersonal, global approach to wellbeing and giving learners the opportunity to explore and develop what that means for them.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. And now, Irenka, do you have something to say about that?
Irenka Suto: Yes, if I could add to that, there’s this wonderful theory of flow by a researcher called Csikszentmihalyi. Have you ever been in that situation when time whizzes by because you’re enjoying and you’re fully immersed in what you’re doing, the time just passes, that could be playing in the school orchestra, it could be solving maths problems, it could be playing chess, it could be being engaged in a really good discussion or a debate about the topic of history or English?
And you feel as though you’re functioning to your fullest capacity and you’re really, really living life and you get that huge sense of satisfaction. I think that’s something that we can all see in young people and children in our schools when their wellbeing is high.
Tamsin Hart: Absolutely, yeah, I can really relate to being afloat. And I was reading the other day an interesting article about how the passage of time is affected by if you’re out in nature, time appears to move slower and which is also very good for your wellbeing. Roz, what are your thoughts on the topic?
Ros McLellan: Just to pick up on your last point before I address your question, Tamsin, that one of my postdocs I’m working with at the moment is actually looking at that notion of temporality in time. So this is a really interesting research area at the moment, even if it’s slightly tangential to the topic we’re talking about today. But to go back to your question about wellbeing in school, I absolutely agree. It’s the relational, it’s the letting young people find meaning and purpose.
So I suppose what we must bear in mind here, if we’re thinking about this and this perhaps is partly the conversation we’ll need to go on to, is how schools can support that. I think there’s often a sort of an assumption when we talk about wellbeing that this is something that’s situated in an individual’s head, but we must remember the context within which that person is situated.
And I think it’s really a very important question to ask, to what extent is the ecosystem of our schools, and that includes educational policy from government. How is that synonymous, if you like, or synergistic with supporting young people’s wellbeing in a school context? So, for instance, not all young people are academic necessarily and are going to get, you know, the very highest grades.
I think it can be an issue of schools where they’re being judged by Ofsted here in the UK to get the best possible academic results. But is that actually going to support all our young people? We’ve got a system where people have to fall off and fail. And I think that’s a really problematic issue in our schools today. So I suppose I’m asking, what is the purpose of schooling here? It’s a bit broader in my mind than just this idea of quantification, which Gert Biesta talks about. I think it’s about meaning and purpose as well.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you very much.
Sarah Nelson: Tamsin. Sorry, I’ve got one other bit just to add to a point that you made before that, like Ros was speaking to, the little bit about being outside.
So when we were actually researching content around what would be covered by a wellbeing curriculum, we started looking into different aspects that included around being outside and what that does. And we looked into green space therapy, where it suggested that just being outside in a green space for around half an hour, so just taking a walk through a wood, for example, could actually have a physiological effect on your body that you would have a reduction in your blood pressure.
So lots of different things that is out there. I don’t know where I’m going with this sentence, but that was the point that I was trying to just link to you, that I just thought it was a really interesting fact to bring us to!
Tamsin Hart: That’s brilliant. No, absolutely. Absolutely. It relates. It always it makes me think of we can cut this out if we need to. It makes me think of shinrin-yoku because I’m going to mispronounce it horribly. The Japanese concept of forest bathing. And how that’s a kind of a general thing that people will do. They’ll just take their time to go outside into the forest to feel well, and they know that makes them feel well.
Irenka Suto: Sounds wonderful.
Sarah Nelson: And I think it does, doesn’t it? And I think there’s this kind of tangential links around kind of the green space therapy, forest bathing, sound baths. There was another piece that we found around the effects of being near water, particularly hearing water rush, that there are some people that believe that the movement of water has an effect on the air around us and that that has another physiological effect.
It’s just really fascinating all these different ways that as Ros was saying before, that our environment affects our wellbeing, that it isn’t just inside our head.
Cambridge Wellbeing Programme
Tamsin Hart: Thank you. Okay, now let’s return now to the development of the wellbeing curriculum that you mentioned before, Sarah. Why was it developed and what are its aims?
Sarah Nelson: So here at Cambridge, we believe that wellbeing has its own intrinsic value and that a learner’s educational experience should be holistic. And as I’ve already mentioned, that’s inclusive of their cognitive, emotional and social development because we really want them to be able to demonstrate and fulfil their full potential, whatever that may be. And that’s exactly what we outlined, for example, in the Cambridge approach to improving education. So that belief was one driver for the development of the wellbeing curriculum.
But another was that we listened to what schools and teachers were telling us is really important for them. So when we listened, what we heard was is that they could see the importance of wellbeing, but they wanted more support from Cambridge in implementing it in their particular context. And so our response to that was to develop our primary and lower secondary wellbeing programme.
And the aims really of the curriculum are to provide learners with an opportunity to develop their understanding of factors that contribute to their emotional and physical wellbeing, to practice a wide range of strategies for managing their emotional and physical wellbeing, to explore a wide range of interpersonal relationships, so that includes friendships, family, the importance of community and social responsibility, and to demonstrate positive, expressive and receptive communication skills when they’re interacting with others.
We also want them to be able to manage their own safety and respond to change in a really wide range of situations that the world kind of throws at us day to day. And we want them to explore how they can contribute to the wellbeing of others. So again, it’s going back to that personal, interpersonal and looking outside themselves to what they can do to support a global understanding of wellbeing.
Pauline Stirling: Adding on to what Sarah said, it’s about giving teachers the tools to empower learners to understand what makes them feel well. So as Sarah said, teachers know that wellbeing is important. They know that they need to teach wellbeing. It needs to be embedded in the school curriculum, but the resource gives teachers that ability to empower the learners to know how to manage their own wellbeing. It empowers the learners to take their place in the world, in a world that’s changing, uncertain, interconnected. I might have waffled that bit, but I just wanted to sort of say it was about giving teachers the tools to help the learners to do something that they need to do. That makes sense.
Sarah Nelson: Absolutely. Because what we’ll find as well is that when looking at the learning objectives that are within the curriculum, you’ll find that we are empowering learners to explore why something is the way it is, or to give them knowledge about wellbeing, to give them meta language, to be able to talk about their own thoughts. So thinking about that relationship between your thinking and being able to express those thoughts, to be able to express your truer self as well.
But also, I would say predominantly the curriculum is about giving strategies. How do you actually activate your own wellbeing? So it’s bringing those different aspects together to be as effective as possible.
Irenka Suto: And if I can add to that, Sarah, I think what you’re saying really demonstrates the idea of a more holistic approach to education. And I think the OECD has suggested that taking a more holistic approach acknowledges those broader social, economical, societal responsibilities of education. It’s not just about getting the highest academic grades, whilst many people do find those very important as well.
Sarah Nelson: Absolutely, and because the research that we’re finding as well is that if you focus on wellbeing and you end up with happy children, then there will be a knock-on effect on academic attainment anyway. So it’s not an either or. You focus on one and there will be that effect on the other.
Irenka Suto: Agreed. Yes, I think there’s research that indicates that if you assess wellbeing and academic achievement at the same point in time, there’s an association. But also if you assess wellbeing and academic achievement a couple of years later, for example, with GCSEs, there’s an association there.
What is the Cambridge Wellbeing Check?
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. Irenka, would you like to come in there, it seems appropriate to tell me about the development of the Cambridge Wellbeing Check, why it was developed and what its aims are?
Irenka Suto: Sure, yes, yes of course. Yes, I work in the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) which has a very long history, a 40-year history of trying to help teachers to understand their young people and their children, the pupils in their classrooms. So at the start of a school year children often take CEM assessments and that gives teachers an idea of their academic potential, but we wanted to be more informative than that and to help teachers to understand the children in their classrooms more generally, more broadly, and we knew that wellbeing was important, so we wanted to take this more holistic approach.
And I’m a researcher by background, I was reading the Cambridge Journal of Education, which is a fantastic journal, and I came across Ros’s paper and I thought, ah, she’s in Cambridge too, she’s in the Faculty of Education.
So I reached out to Ros and we met up and agreed that we should work together. And when it came to developing the wellbeing check from Ros’s research tool, it was about making it accessible to lots of different schools, lots of different children around the world. So we reviewed the wording of the questions. We looked at the language demand of them and we looked at whether they would work internationally. We made a few tweaks. We looked at the statistics associated with the different questions to check how they clustered together, which questions do children commonly answer in a similar way. We piloted it with around 5 ,000 children internationally and international schools and we found that it works very well. We found that teachers really got a lot of useful information from it. I’d say the wellbeing check has four main uses.
One of those is using it as part of education, so to teach and explore wellbeing with students and that’s how it fits with the curriculum that Sarah’s been talking about. It can also be used to evaluate the wellbeing of groups of students, year groups or girls or boys or children with a particular background. It can be used to understand individuals’ levels of wellbeing and what their individual needs might be.
And then it can also be used to evaluate the impacts of interventions that schools might put in place to improve wellbeing. So just as Roz has talked about her research, which was looking to evaluate the impact of a creativity intervention in schools, the wellbeing check could be used to evaluate other interventions and initiatives to improve children’s wellbeing.
Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary Wellbeing resources
Tamsin Hart: Amazing, thank you. So many uses. Now let’s look at some other resources. Pauline, can you tell me about the development of the Cambridge Wellbeing resources, what their aims are and how they can help teachers and students?
Pauline Stirling: Yes, I’ve recently worked on the scheme of work and the lesson plans for the Cambridge Wellbeing resources for the stages seven to nine. And Sarah has already spoken about the aims of the resource, but they are to develop learners understanding of what contributes to wellbeing through exploring emotions, socialisation and the physical side of wellbeing, the nutrition and exercise.
We’ve been looking at exploring different cultural and contextual approaches to wellbeing. And so it’s very important developing the ability to self-regulate, to have the ability to manage their own wellbeing. We’ve looked at how to develop learners’ understanding of how humans learn and reflect on their own learning habits and practices and how they can improve to develop a critical awareness of the benefits and dangers of social media and the internet and other modern technologies.
And as I mentioned before, to empower learners to take their place in an ever-changing, information-heavy, interconnected and uncertain world. Now Cambridge uses active learning to describe a classroom approach, which acknowledges that learners are active in the learning process by building knowledge and understanding in response to learning opportunities provided by their teacher.
Active learning fosters learners learning and their autonomy, giving them greater involvement and control over their learning and give them the skills to foster lifelong learning for the future. It’s closely associated with learning how to learn. And this approach, the Cambridge approach, very much supports the wellbeing curriculum. So the scheme of work identifies learning objectives with suggested teaching activities, so usually more than one activity, so some flexibility there, and identifies resources that are always easily accessible.
There is language support, particularly with learners who have English as a second or maybe third language in mind, in both the scheme of work and the lesson plans. Now, in my opinion, a good wellbeing curriculum offers an improved sense of belonging and community within the school, an improved sense of identity for learners, an increase in learners’ self-confidence and self-esteem, a safe space, and I’ll probably come back to safe space again in the future because that’s very important from day one, a safe space for learners to ask questions, be listened to, get the answers.
Although again, I’ll say later on about teachers are not expected to be experts on everything when it comes to wellbeing or anything about social health education. A focus on issues that might be affecting learners of a certain age within the school. So this curriculum goes from primary through to lower secondary and the needs of learners are obviously very different.
The needs of an eight-year-old are very different to the needs of a 12-year-old, and we are focusing on issues that might affect learners of a certain age. And it’s also a good wellbeing curriculum, gives schools, gives teachers an opportunity to identify learners who are experiencing issues that might be affecting their wellbeing. And we’ve already mentioned how learners’ wellbeing will then affect their academic results as well. So schools can pick up on those learners that are experiencing issues, interventions can then be put in place early on, which then would not only help the learner’s wellbeing, but help them socially, academically. And then, you know, further support may be put in to develop that learner’s full potential.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. It seems very broad and very flexible.
Sarah Nelson: Pauline has just mentioned all the different ways in which these are examples of good curricula, good wellbeing resources and we’ve heard from Ros and Irenka just how good the Wellbeing Check is. But I think it’s important to say as well that we believe that curriculum coherence is a really important facet to remember when developing any sort of programme.
And so what we have, is our curriculum, our pedagogy and our assessment that come together in a way that creates something even better than the sum of its parts. Because what we have is a curriculum that is supported by these excellent resources, where we then have the wellbeing check that both assesses and supports teaching and learning when we take that findings back in to ensure that it’s really effectively implemented.
We also provide guidance both in the digital teacher resources about how you can map between the Wellbeing Check and the curriculum and then use those resources to effectively address any areas that come up as issues identified by the Wellbeing Check. And also we have an infographic that demonstrates how these come together and how you can use them effectively in school.
Tamsin Hart: Absolutely. Right from the beginning of using your diagnostic tools to how you would use the curriculum then in your class and how the resources would support you doing that with a lesson plan. Fantastic. Thank you, Sarah.
Irenka, did you have something to say?
Irenka Suto (36:48): Just to add to that, when it comes to assessing wellbeing, you can assess somebody’s wellbeing, how they’re feeling, how well they feel they’re doing, and you can assess how well they understand issues around wellbeing. Can they name five ways to live a healthy life or something like that? And what the wellbeing check is doing is assessing somebody’s wellbeing themselves.
So we might find for example, that my wellbeing is quite high when it comes to my life satisfaction and maybe I don’t experience too many feelings of sadness or anxiety, but that I’m struggling in the area of interpersonal relationships, for example, and that I don’t feel I have many friends or I don’t feel I’m getting on well with my teacher. And if we can identify an area where quite a few children are having challenges, then that might be an area to focus on with particular resources in the classroom, with particular lessons and so on.
Tamsin Hart: Absolutely. And thinking back to the creativity aspect we were talking about before, Ros, actually, I just remembered also that we have our Cambridge Reading Adventures series, which are a series of primary reading scheme, which we’ve also mapped to the curriculum resources. And so it’s using storytelling as a way of understanding well -being as well, which I find really interesting.
Ros McLellan: Yeah, absolutely, because I think some young people find it difficult to talk, if you just asked them how they were feeling, they might find it rather difficult to talk to an adult about that. So having other ways into these conversations can also be really helpful. And I’m not familiar with the tools that and the resources that have been developed, but I can see that a whole range of creative approaches can be really helpful. I mean, in my own research, I’ve used collage and you know, drawings for young people to express how they feel about school. And that’s always been extremely helpful as an insight into how they’re feeling.
Sarah Nelson: And I think I can add to Ros’s point as well that I think it’s great to have the Cambridge Reading Adventures supporting the primary wellbeing curriculum in multiple ways because we have one where, as just mentioned, it creates a safe way of discussing potentially sensitive topics for learners to explore in that way. But it also supports that integration that you can use the Cambridge Reading Adventures, say, for example, in your English curriculum.
And then be embedding wellbeing during those discussions. So it’s not a bolt on, it’s not an additional thing that teachers need to think about. It is something that is embedded in the rest of their school curriculum. And I think that speaks to what we’ve already been talking about so far around wellbeing being holistic. This is something that is part of the everyday and that’s how we should be thinking of it.
Main challenges when implementing wellbeing policy in schools
Tamsin Hart: What are the main challenges about implementing wellbeing in schools? I’m going to come to you first, Pauline.
Pauline Stirling: We’ve mentioned several times about it being a holistic approach. If we’re looking for developing a whole school wellbeing, maybe from scratch, it means effectively implementing changes across the whole school. So it means changing a school culture, ethos and environment, and that can take time. And there might then be challenges to overcome. One could be negative attitudes, a lack of understanding of the importance of developing school mental health and its impact on learning.
And another one might be lack of time or budget can cause resistance to change or to try something new.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. Does anyone else have any thoughts on that? Ros, let’s go to you.
Ros McLellan: I can’t agree more with you, Pauline. It goes back to that whole sort of school ecosystem and we need to consider that. There is a researcher called Bronfenbrenner who talks about that at great length and regarding particularly resilience research but also wellbeing. So we need to think about school policies, we need to think about the leadership must support it. It must, the biggest challenge is making this the job of everyone I think and it’s not, I think Sarah used the phrase ‘bolt on’ it’s got to not be a bolt on it’s just got to be what we do in this school has to permeate everything you know that happens in in the school and I think that could be the biggest challenge for people to to make that shift in mindset to think it’s not a big additional task it’s just what we do around here.
Irenka Suto: I think one of the challenges in some schools can be helping teachers to understand that wellbeing can be seen as a psychological state and that means that it can be quite different and vary across children of actually pretty similar material circumstances. Sometimes we think straight away about welfare issues, having enough food, having comfortable clothes, having well-fitting shoes and so on, good electricity supply in some areas, but children in the same physical material circumstances can actually have quite different wellbeing levels. Some can feel really well in a certain situation, some can feel have much lower levels of well -being and that can be hard to appreciate. You may see a child in your school and think, well they’ve got everything, they’re from a fantastic family or they have wonderful opportunities in this wonderful school to do all of these wonderful extracurricular activities, they come from an affluent background, what’s the problem? And that can be challenging to grasp, I think, sometimes.
Sarah Nelson: Yeah, I think I can add to Pauline and Ros’s point about the challenges in school that to pick up around time and think about how we operationalise a wellbeing curriculum or wellbeing programme in schools, because we recognise that time really is a really precious commodity in schools. And so when it comes to designing a programme, we want it to be integrated so that we’re not adding to a school curriculum that’s already very full.
And to support schools in implementing that, what we’ve already done is we’ve mapped our wellbeing curriculum against all the other subjects within the primary and lower secondary curricula. So all the other 10 subjects that we have, and we provide that information already linked to each learning objective within our schemes of work. So it means it’s taking off some of that mental load, that operational load to integrate leaving space to address some of the other issues that have already just been mentioned.
Implementing wellbeing practice in schools
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. So given these challenges, what are important factors to consider when implementing wellbeing in schools? Shall I come back to you, Sarah?
Sarah Nelson: Great. I think one of the most important factors is getting full engagement from all staff. And when I say that, I mean all staff, not just teachers. This is everyone within the school. Everyone needs to be aware of the curriculum, of the messages that you’re intending to convey to learners. And that’s so that not only are they accidentally undermined, but instead that they’re consciously being reinforced through every interaction that learners experience while they’re in that particular context.
Pauline Stirling: Yeah, I agree totally with what Sarah just said. We need to, before approaching wellbeing, whole school wellbeing, we need to ensure those challenges of time, possibly budget, maybe negative attitudes are addressed first. So that everybody is on the same page and it can be, to be successful, wellbeing should be properly integrated into the whole school community and embedded into the curriculum.
The Cambridge Wellbeing Curriculum, it can be taught as a standalone curriculum. But also, as Sarah says, there is the mapping across other subjects and something which we will look at in a minute, is the teachable moments at other times. And the teachable moments can be during a wellbeing lesson or during another identified lesson, or could just be a playground moment or a registration or during lunch, those teachable moments will come up at any point and it’s getting everybody on board to make sure that wellbeing is embedded across the whole curriculum and integrated into the whole school.
Tamsin Hart: Wonderful. So those teachable moments are allowing you to deal with those time constraints of giving you the flexibility. Now, Irenka, did you have any thoughts?
Irenka Suto: Yes, I absolutely agree that the whole school approach is the ideal. I think everyone should be engaged with wellbeing. It’s got such intrinsic value. I would also say, though, that sometimes that can seem like a really huge mountain to climb and that a teacher might be listening to us here thinking, well, my school isn’t at that point yet. We don’t have a whole school well -being strategy. We don’t have the resources to do this just yet. We’re just at the start of our wellbeing journey. And I would say it’s always possible to start small and to build up in what you do.
So just asking all the children in your class how they’re feeling, learning the names of all the children that you will greet as they come into school in the morning, ensuring that every child has at least one strong professional relationship with a member of staff somewhere in the school. There are lots of small things we can do even if our schools aren’t at the point of fully embracing wellbeing and that there are still people, members of staff to convince in your school.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. And Ros, what are your thoughts?
Ros McLellan: Well, two separate things to say. I think firstly, it’s really important for it to be whole school and engage everyone. So the tone has to be set from the top in that respect. And I think that whoever’s leading that institution has to really walk the walk as well as do the talk. So that they’re modelling this for others to see. So I think that is important.
But I do also agree with Irenka that if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking I haven’t really got a supportive senior leadership team in my school, do not give up hope. There’s definitely you can make a difference as a classroom teacher. So in that case, I would say it’s about finding your tribe, reaching out, making connections with other teachers, sharing ideas, sharing frustrations as well, because it’s really difficult to be pushing water, what might feel like pushing water uphill sometimes.
So I think you do need to find some buddies in order to support you. So don’t give up part. And the third thing I was going to say actually is also don’t forget the community that school serves. It’s quite easy, I think sometimes the schools to draw up the drawbridge and say, right, this is our community and we do things in here and we don’t necessarily engage with the community in which we sit.
But communities have different values and I think that needs to be represented in the work of the school, which is how well -being can take slightly different formats, I think in different contexts. So it’s about engagement with the community as well, if that’s at all possible.
Dr Irenka Suto: Ros, I know a wonderful example of a school in the north of England where they have great community engagement and they’ve developed a wonderful vegetable garden where parents come in and support the school with growing vegetables and the whole school benefits from the produce. And it’s a wonderful way of getting parents into school and talking to them and understanding the backgrounds of the children and where they’re coming from really.
Tamsin Hart: That sounds amazing. Nature and community, what we were talking about before.
That leads on rather nicely. Are there any good examples you’ve seen in your travels and research of wellbeing catered well for in schools? Would anyone like to lead on that for me? Sarah?
Sarah Nelson: I think I could say as well is that the best example I’ve seen definitely speaks to Ros and Irenka’s points about you can start small and how it can be a personal journey as well as a whole school journey in that the best practice I’ve seen is where teachers really take the time to know their learners and where that knowledge of learners is then reflected back into their interactions both in and out of the classroom. Because every time I see it going into schools and see that practice, it reminds me of a really lovely quote from
Rachel Remen who said, being safe is about being seen and heard and allowed to be who you are and to speak your truth. So it’s by knowing their learners well, those teachers are empowering them to know, be and develop their truer selves. And so I think that’s a wonderful thing to see and can only be built on further.
Pauline Stirling: Yes, so the best example I’ve seen is when schools have actually embedded the wellbeing in the curriculum and you see it on a day to day. The Cambridge wellbeing resource identifies the teachable moments, but these are things that we touch on daily in the classroom. So if you’re encouraging learners to express how they’re feeling, if they appear sad, worried or upset help them to find the appropriate words to express their feelings sensitively. And that meets one of the learning objectives, which is identify a wide range of emotions in themselves and others using appropriate and sensitive vocabulary.
We can also, we’ve mentioned about being outside in a nature after a weekend. Ask learners what they did over the weekend. If their activities involve being outside, ask them what physical and mental benefits they felt from being outside.
And that meets the learning objective, explore the physical and mental benefits of spending time outside and in nature. Ensure that different cultural groups feel a sense of belonging within the class by allowing learners to show and tell when appropriate. This might be sharing experience of a festival or a national day, might be showing a costume, photographs or an artefact. And that meets the learning objective, understand how connections with others can support a sense of belonging. So.
Good examples are there every day when it’s embedded in the curriculum. I also once worked in a school where there was a very successful school where the motto, it was a primary school, and the motto was happy and successful and then in brackets in that order. And that was always brought in constantly. The head used to say it all the time that the learners had to be happy in order to be successful.
And it was a very successful school with high academic results through the junior school, through the senior school, but that was the motto. And we were constantly being brought back to that, that happy and successful in that order.
Tamsin Hart: Lovely, thank you Pauline. Ros, can you think of any examples?
Ros McLellan: I think an example I’d like to share is an example from New Zealand and it’s published in a book I edited called Wellbeing and Schooling. So we can put the link in the show notes if people are interested. But it was from a Māori community school where they brought the Māori elders in and they talked and decided what would be good wellbeing strategies to support young people in their school context. And one example was the, I’m just reading from here so I get the pronunciation right.
was the use of a waitaiki, which is a kahutu Māori stone, which is a green jade stone. And this was to represent the energy of the classroom. And this was something that was very sacred in Māori culture. So they had this jade stone sat in its own little ketibasket. And any time the children in the class felt that they needed, they felt a bit sad and needed a top up, they would go touch the Maori stone. They would go and touch it and close their eyes and the energy would emanate from that stone. And it was referred to regularly in the class at the start of term, after a holiday, et cetera, et cetera. So this was something that was a very physical embodiment, if you like, of what wellbeing was in that culture. And it worked really well in that classroom. So obviously, this wouldn’t fit in our culture. But I think it speaks to that point about understanding what’s valued in particular cultures, bringing the community in to discuss that.
So it connects home life with school life and then young people can work with whatever the strategies are that are relevant, that have been discussed collectively. So that’s the example I would like to share.
Tamsin Hart: That sounds brilliant. Thank you. And, Irenka, did you have any other examples to add?
Irenka Suto: Yes, I visited a school in Malaysia last year which was taking a really serious look at wellbeing in its school and teachers were really interested in the wellbeing of students with lower levels of English language. It’s a Cambridge school and many students have lower levels of English in that school and there was a real recognition in the school that wellbeing is affected by not having the language, not just to access the curriculum, perhaps in a subject that you’re really good at in your own language, when it’s taught in your own language, for example, Japanese or Korean, but also in terms of making friends and feeling a part of the community. And so they were really focusing on how improving language, English language skills could really help with wellbeing both inside and outside the classroom.
Creating wellbeing opportunities in the classroom
Tamsin Hart:
Really interesting, thank you. Do these examples make you think of any good opportunities there are for implementing wellbeing in the classroom?
Who would like to start with that one?
Sarah Nelson: So as we’ve already mentioned, we have throughout our schemes of work and in the digital teacher resources, we talk about these spontaneous teachable moments. And we’ve heard a couple of examples and references already from Pauline, but these are opportunities to reinforce and fully embed those wellbeing practices, both in the classroom and more broadly in interactions with learners.
And we don’t want to just say, come up with all these ideas on your own, we actually do provide examples for every single part of the curriculum and give that support for how to embed them. So for example, we talk about stages one to three, we have a learning objective that’s about knowing how to wash your hands properly. So you may explicitly teach children a technique for how to wash their hands, but you’re going to want to keep embedding that every time they’re going to the bathroom, every time they’re washing their hands before touching food or after they’ve been playing outside or touching dirt or something else. So it’s that constant reinforcement of going back and finding opportunities to, as we’ve said before, build in wellbeing into every aspect of your interactions, every aspect of their life.
Pauline Stirling:
Yes, it doesn’t even need to be in the classroom. I’m thinking about outside the classroom. If a learner is seen dropping litter or making kind comments to another learner in the playground, we can remind them that it’s everyone’s responsibility to look after the environment, whether that’s their physical environment or their social environment.
In the classroom, if a learner is struggling when responding to a given or a self-created task or a challenge, we can encourage them to persevere and share ideas with others, working towards growing their independence and creating their own solutions. And sort of connected with that is the reminding learners of the metacognitive strategies that they’ve learnt whenever appropriate to reinforce the benefit for learners.
Sarah Nelson: I think important just to add as well that these are strategies that we’re saying teachers can use, but also over time as they become more naturalised within the school setting, these are things that learners can also be doing to support themselves and their peers.
Tamsin Hart: No, absolutely. Making sure they can independently kind of care for themselves, which is brilliant. Ros, or Irenka. Do you have any thoughts about opportunities?
Ros McLellan: I think, I totally agree with everything that’s been said, but I think something very, very simple comes back to something we said earlier, which is that for learners to feel safe, they need to feel seen and understood in that context. And one way a teacher can do that is just simply knowing all the kids, making sure they know all the kids’ names, because I know especially in a big secondary school where you maybe teach, I don’t know, something like 200 learners over a week.
It can be quite a challenge to really get to know those individuals, but making it your business and greeting them all by name as they come in the classroom and knowing something about what they’ve been up to and mentioning it. That might take a five minutes and the lesson may therefore be truncated, but that five minutes could be really time well spent, you know. So I think that’s a very simple strategy.
Wellbeing challenges
Tamsin Hart: And thinking about challenges, what about generational specific issues such as climate anxiety, recovering from the pandemic? What’s the impact and how can we tackle them? Let’s go to you, Pauline.
Pauline Stirling: Yes, so we as adults need to be aware and empathetic to how generational specific issues might affect young people’s mental wellbeing. Climate anxiety, for instance, affects young people much more than older generations. They are on the whole much more aware of the issues of climate change. And the pandemic has shone a light on the importance of mental health. Lockdowns caused loneliness. We all had to get used to new routines which cause stress.
There was the anxiety caused by fear of us or our loved ones becoming ill. And then of course, we mentioned today so much about physical exercise, fresh air, how good that is for our healthy daily routines. Then during the lockdowns, the lack of the physical exercise, fresh air and our healthy daily routines may have caused depression. And we can tackle these issues firstly by being aware that they exist, by recognizing that they exist. And as I was saying earlier about, knowing the differences of the mental well, the issues that might affect the mental wellbeing of a primary age child to a secondary age child. It’s the same with these. We need to make sure that we know that these issues are there and then we tackle them. And the Cambridge Wellbeing Resource is very flexible. It means that we can focus, we don’t have to go through the curriculum step by step. We can focus on particular learning objectives as issues arise.
Tamsin Hart: Absolutely, thank you very much. Does anyone else have any thought about generational specific issues?
Sarah Nelson: I would say in terms of the curriculum, what we do is avoid focusing too specifically on time sensitive issues. So for example, the COVID -19 pandemic, but that isn’t to say that we don’t address these issues. So what we do instead is provide a focus on giving learners the opportunity to develop their knowledge, skills and strategies that they will need in order to face those particular issues, but also that can be applicable to any future issues that we don’t know will yet arise.
So for example, if we think about the COVID-19 pandemic as our example, there’s been a lot written concerning the development of social communication skills for children born during the pandemic lockdowns. So depending on a country’s school starting age, these children are either currently or will very soon be starting primary school.
So if we look at the wellbeing curriculum, you look at, say, stages one to three, you’ll see that there are opportunities, for example, in the ‘My Relationship’ strand, for them to be developing those social communication skills and doing so in a supportive and structured way that is age -appropriate. So we’re addressing these challenges, but doing so, as I say, in a way that then has broader capabilities, broader capacity to address anything we haven’t already seen yet.
Irenka Suto: I just wanted to touch upon the impact of the pandemic in many parts of the world. There were major lockdowns, national or regional lockdowns, which resulted in schools being closed and children missing large chunks of their education and in some cases getting used to working from home or working remotely from somewhere else. And since the end of the pandemic, in some places fewer children have actually returned to school and there have been reduced attendance rates in certain demographics with some groups of children. And it’s a really important thing for children to be in school. And I think a key thing is feeling safe, feeling you’ve got people who value you, who look out for you in the school environment. So building those interpersonal relationships within school, I think are you know, so important for high school attendance and then ultimately higher achievement in all aspects of school life.
Ros McLellan:
Just to build on that, I mean, I do think post pandemic there’s been a lot of hype about, you know, the learning loss in terms of academic perspective. But I think it’s absolutely really important that we focus on the social emotional learning of our young people, because ultimately these are the skills that are going to help them in life more generally. So I think the points Sarah and Pauline made were really, really important in that regard.
In terms of things like climate anxiety, I think young people can feel a real sense of hopelessness or learned helplessness that they feel they have no control over this. So I think and indeed, you know, that that is a big issue that climate change is happening. So I think the way we can help them navigate that is through the knowledge and understanding of the issues that are underlying this. They have a better understanding that will help them to develop a bit more agency so that it’s, you know, they feel that they may not be able to control it, but they can navigate their place within this. So I think it’s that sense of giving knowledge, understanding and some degree of agency. However, I do appreciate that’s not an easy gig, so to speak.
Sarah Nelson: That really brings to mind as well the fact that we’ve been talking now about the impact of wellbeing on learners and that context in school. And I think as well, it’s just really key to say that teachers and any other adults that are working well, no, any other adults at all also need to be thinking about their wellbeing, that we help others by helping ourselves as well.
Key things to remember
Tamsin Hart: Absolutely, yeah. Thank you so much for all your really interesting thoughts, really practical thoughts today. Let’s finish with this one. If a teacher was going to start thinking about wellbeing in their school today, what would be the key message you would offer them? I’m going to start with Pauline.
Pauline Stirling: So I’m thinking about the teacher teaching their first wellbeing lesson. You know, it’s the beginning of the school year, they’re going to start teaching wellbeing in their classroom. For me, I say step one is to create a safe space in the classroom, ensuring that learners are aware of their rights and responsibility when discussing wellbeing. For example, the right to be heard, the responsibility to listen to others, set the ground rules, manage expectations right from day one so that there’s a safe space to discuss the sensitive issues that they need to discuss.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. Now, Sarah.
Sarah Nelson: I would say no one is starting from zero. We’ve heard so many ways that schools are already exemplifying wellbeing in their context. So I think it’s about reflecting on what successes do you already have and using that as a basis to think forward to how then you’re going to build on those existing successes to build that holistic, inclusive approach to wellbeing.
Ros McLellan: I think I would say, you probably already know how to promote wellbeing as a teacher, so have confidence in yourself. Obviously look at some resources, get some ideas, but don’t feel that this is such a massive new thing that you can’t do it. I think everyone should have some confidence in the starting point. I also agree with Pauline that you need to start discussing with your class, finding the language, making it a safe space to be able to do that. So, you know, think small maybe and, you know, underestimate yourself. I think people sometimes think, oh, I’m a, you know, I used to teach maths, oh, a maths teacher, what would I know about wellbeing? Actually, you know, you will know a lot. And once you start looking at some of the resources, you’ll start, which will be really helpful to you. You will also get other ideas and think, oh, in my context, I could do this. So, you know, yeah, have faith.
Tamsin Hart: Lovely message. And Irenka, how about you?
Irenka Suto: Yes, I would add to what Ros is saying, you don’t need to be an expert in wellbeing, you don’t need to have studied psychology, you don’t need to have done research in this area, you don’t need to be an expert in PSHE or any of these subjects. Everybody can take responsibility seriously, whatever their school subject, whatever their role in the school and do small things to help the children and young people that they encounter and work with.
Tamsin Hart:
Brilliant. Thank you so much. That’s all we have time for today on our wellbeing episode. Thank you to Sarah, Ros, Pauline and Irenka for being such fantastic guests and sharing some really useful inspirational insights. Don’t forget to tell your friends and colleagues about us and rate our show on whatever platform you’re listening on. Our show notes have lots of useful links that we’ve discussed throughout this episode, so be sure to take a look at them.
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