Mental Health and Wellbeing

Why is mental health and wellbeing important?

At Hill View the children’s mental health and wellbeing is extremely important to us. When children have good levels of wellbeing it helps them to learn and explore the world; feel, express and manage positive and negative emotions; form and maintain good relationships with others; cope with and manage change, setbacks and uncertainty and fully develop and thrive.

We are keen to do everything we can to help our children look after their mental health and develop the coping skills that boost their resilience, self-esteem and confidence, which in turn will help them engage positively with their education and improve their academic attainment.

At Hill View we are very fortunate to have Kirsty, our dedicated Mental Health Professional and Dramatherapist as an integral part of the school team. She works closely with the children and staff to help improve emotional wellbeing and provides mental health support for the whole school. Some of her work is with whole classes, as group counselling or as one to one interventions. Unfortunately it’s not always easy to identify a child whose mental health is deteriorating – and signs can often go overlooked. This is where Kirsty’s work is essential. Early identification and action is the best thing school can do to give children the best start in life.

Bounce Together

We are a ‘Bounce Together’ school, with a clear focus on mental health and wellbeing, ensuring this lies at the heart of our school community.
In collaboration with the ‘Bounce Together’ software, we have access to a range of validated surveys to run with our pupils, staff, and parents/carers, ensuring inclusion for the whole school community. This vast array of surveys available addresses issues from resilience through to attitudes to reading and everything else in between.

The intent of using this platform is to create a really clear and concise understanding of mental health and wellbeing within our setting and the wider community.

This is implemented by running these surveys either at regular intervals throughout the academic year or to address a concern that may arise within a cohort or pupil group.

The impact of using ‘Bounce Together’, is that it provides relevant data that informs us about the thoughts, feelings, and views of our school community, thus providing us with the ability to respond accordingly in a range of ways that will support, nurture and encourage all of our stakeholders.

What can I do at Home?

As parents and carers we play an important role in teaching children how to manage and understand their feelings as they grow up. We’ve set up this page to help you at home perhaps begin to address some of the themes and issues that can affect children’s mental health. There will be a series of stories, chosen by Kirsty, which can provide a starting point and suggestions for discussion and some things, based on the story that you could do together. The stories are read by Mr Jackson and viewable by clicking on the link, and each is followed by Kirsty’s ideas to follow up.

We do hope you’ll find them useful and do let us know if there are any themes or ideas you would like us to cover.