Student wellbeing has always been a top priority for schools. Confident and happy students make for productive and positive learners.
In the last three years, the likelihood of young people having a mental health concern has increased by 50%. A school’s responsibility to support mental health care has never been more vital.
However, schools take care of hundreds of students every day. As you’re well aware, it can be challenging to stay connected to each individual and ensure you’re meeting their specific wellbeing needs.
The software you implement at your school should support you in all areas of data management, from student profiles, to grades and reports. Whilst your data stores might seem overwhelming from a manual perspective, the purpose of your MIS or other management system is to ensure that you can make the most of that data to drive school performance. This same software can do the same for your school’s wellbeing effort.
Fundamentally, data drives your ability to support your students in all areas of their school life. A dedicated pastoral or wellbeing solution is key to enabling you to manage the wellbeing and behavioural data of your student body.
- What software solutions do you need?
- Clarity
- Accessibility and data privacy
- Consistency and real-time updates
- Integration
- iSAMS supports children's mental health in schools
What software solutions do you need?
There are a variety of solutions available to schools to enable them to best manage their student’s wellbeing and overall care. Chances are, you’re already implementing some kind of pastoral solution. Ultimately, your software all needs to work together in order to best perform for your students.
The combination of the following solutions enables you to take a holistic approach to student wellbeing throughout your school:
- Comprehensive MIS: Your MIS or other management system ultimately handles all of your student data, and works with your other systems to drive your daily operations. Clean and manageable data ultimately improves efficiency across departments.
- Pastoral management: A dedicated pastoral module or solution ensures that your teams can access all the data that they need and focus on their individual responsibilities in one organised system.
- Medical care solution: Student wellbeing isn’t just about mental health. Medical care is a key part of a student’s overall wellbeing, and a dedicated medical care system ensures that all physical care needs are met, from vaccinations, to doctors' visits and medications.
- Behavioural monitoring: Often, the first sign of a mental health and wellbeing concern is a change in the student’s behaviour. Clear and concise behavioural tracking systems ensure that any issues can be flagged in a timely manner.
Clarity
The first step to effectively managing anything within a school is complete data clarity for all staff members. Your clean data stores and user-friendly software ensure that all key data for student wellbeing is accessible and palatable.
You need to ensure that all those involved in a child’s care can understand and manage the data stored within your software solutions. For example. the iSAMS Wellbeing Manager offers multiple features to ensure that each child’s needs are clear.
These include:
- Easy-to-view timeline: Access an overall glance at a student’s experiences while at your school for better context over their care, as well as identifying moments that had the most significant impact.
- Concise flag system: Easily and quickly indicate the severity of a student concern or life event with a colour-coded flag system, ensuring that a student’s profile can be understood at a glance.
- Interactive dashboard: Quickly find the most relevant information for your pastoral needs, including a display for recently listed students with concerns, required action points, life event lists and date reminders.
- Automated Alerts: Identify trends in student behaviour to ensure that potential concerns are addressed early with automatic alerts and notifications set according to your school’s wellbeing workflows and frameworks, including regular reports on behavioural data.
Accessibility and data privacy
All parties involved in each student’s care need to be kept up to date with the latest information and changes in order to ensure a truly holistic approach. This can be challenging if data is kept in manual stores, such as Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets, or only accessible to certain parties, who are then charged with sharing that data. Not only that, but this process can result in risks to the privacy of personal student data.
Strict and relevant user permissions are key to protecting each student’s sensitive information, but it’s equally important that pastoral, medical, and teaching staff have access to relevant wellbeing information when required.
A cloud-based system ensures that software is accessible quickly, from anywhere. Combined with strict user permission settings within an appropriate pastoral system, you can ensure that all relevant staff members are up to date, while still protecting your students.
Consistency and real-time updates
Each student deserves the same level of care, regardless of their current wellbeing status. Mental and physical health can change very quickly, for all of us. That’s why it’s so important to be consistent with every student and ensure they all receive the same safeguarding and care efforts.
However, with so many students to care for, it can be difficult to manually ensure that each student is receiving appropriate touch points with pastoral, medical, or teaching staff.
You need a solution that automates the concern identification and notification process. Automated concern alerts within the iSAMS Wellbeing Manager enable schools to automatically identify concerning trends in student behaviour. Receive automated notifications and reports on student behavioural trends, ensuring that key concerns are identified and addressed as quickly as possible.
Inbuilt notifications for new events and changes, as well as a clear flag system, ensure that risk factors and wellbeing issues aren’t missed. This enables schools to feel confident that their entire student body is receiving appropriate care.
Integration
As mentioned, your MIS and associated wellbeing systems contain extremely valuable data for your overall wellbeing effort. However, managing the data between the two can become extremely time-consuming when it’s a manual process.
Your systems all need to communicate with each other to provide the best defence against student mental health and wellbeing risks.
With your MIS as your single source of truth, your additional medical care, pastoral care, and behavioural monitoring systems can all integrate and share relevant data – ensuring that all key team members are up to date on each step of a student’s care.
The iSAMS Wellbeing Manager, Medical Centre and Rewards and Conduct module all seamlessly integrate with the iSAMS MIS. Remove unnecessary admin and data sharing, and enable your teams to focus on what’s most important – your students.
iSAMS supports children’s mental health in schools
iSAMS creates each solution with the entire school community in mind. Our Wellbeing Manager ensures that pastoral teams have all the tools they need to best support students throughout their school journey. We know how important student wellbeing is to your school, so it’s key to find the right software solutions that are dedicated to learner health.
For example, our Medical Centre module enables school medical teams to access vital student health information, including vaccinations, medication requirements, doctor’s visits, and more.
If you’d like to learn more about Wellbeing Manager, you can watch a full demo below. Alternatively, iSAMS schools can contact their Customer Account Manager for further details on our range of modules.