Wellbeing

Emotionally Friendly School

St Mary's RC Primary School are engaging in the Emotionally Friendly School (EFS) process. This is a whole school approach to improving the children’s mental health and wellbeing. It is supported by Salford Educational Psychology Service.

This process focuses on four main key areas:

• Staff wellbeing and school ethos.
• Classroom practice.
• Assessing children’s needs.
• Supporting individual children.

One of our key principles, here at St Mary's, is to support the wellbeing of both staff and pupils. We aim to ensure that all children are happy, healthy and able to cope with everything that life may throw at them.  We promote and teach all pupils to be resilient, confident, have positive self-perceptions and appropriate coping mechanisms in a seamless and continuous method of delivery.

By adopting a whole school approach, we can ensure that wellbeing is central to everything that we do.

As adults, we ensure that we develop our understanding of emotions, self-control, positive relationships and keeping our mind and body healthy, in order to support our wellbeing and therefore we can have the best impact upon the pupils we support. We recognise, however, that the mental wellbeing of both staff and pupils can change from day to day and that there are times in everybody's life when a little extra help or support may be needed. Therefore, we have invested heavily in a supportive and nurturing system, the aim of which is to enable all individuals to flourish whilst in attendance at St Mary's.

We also refer pupils to many outside agencies to obtain support from CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service), School Nurse, Speech and Language Therapists, Paediatricians, the Primary Inclusion Team, Gaddums Bereavement Support, the Educational Psychology Service and also Salford’s Learning Support Service. This helps to ensure that each individual received the most rounded care possible.