*Please note: This content was published during the COVID-19 pandemic
Almost everyone in education will have an approximate definition of student wellbeing in their head – the term is everywhere these days. If student wellbeing wasn’t being talked about enough before the pandemic, it certainly is now.
The ISI (Independent Schools Inspectorate) recently released a series of proposals for incorporating student wellbeing into their inspection remit, and a body of evidence is growing around the concept of ‘whole-school approaches’ to wellbeing. Now, more than ever, the onus has been placed on Independent and International Schools to come up with comprehensive policies to support students.
While the circumstances that have thrown wellbeing into sharper relief are unfortunate, the elevation of student wellbeing to a primary issue in schools can only be a positive thing for students. After all, it's logical to assume that happy students are better learners.
In this article we’ll explore:
There are many different definitions of wellbeing, but student wellbeing considers the mental and physical wellbeing of students in the specific context of their educational journey.
One well-known approach to defining wellbeing is by American psychologist and educator Martin Seligman who designed the PERMA Model, which represents what he classifies as the five core elements of happiness and wellbeing:
The ISI in the UK defines student wellbeing by section 10(2) of the Children Act 2004, relating to:
A recent study from Oxford Impact, which drew on data from a wide range of countries, found that there is a strong correlation between a student’s wellbeing and what they accomplish academically.
There is also compelling evidence to suggest that wellbeing is also associated with a range of other student outcomes, including engagement, mental health, self-esteem, self-efficacy, motivation, behaviour and decreased probability of dropout.
According to the ISI, their new inspection framework proposal ‘places the responsibility of the school’s leadership and management and governance to actively promote the wellbeing of pupils.’ This approach highlights the need for school leadership to foster an environment that actively promotes student wellbeing, but responsibility must also be apportioned to parents and guardians, teachers and the students themselves.
The ISI is planning to introduce a new inspection framework at the start of the next inspection cycle in September 2023, including the following proposed changes:
The ISI goes on to suggest the inspections will:
‘Inspect against the Standards through the lens of pupil wellbeing. The first section of our reports will emphasise the importance of leadership and management, as well as summarising key findings from the whole inspection. This will be followed by sections relating to the five areas included within the statutory definition of child wellbeing. This will ensure our reports focus on pupils' wellbeing while capturing the breadth of provision and the range of pupils’ experiences in each school.’
A whole-school approach to wellbeing is a comprehensive, widespread approach to wellbeing that is implemented, encouraged and actively managed by School Leadership Teams (SLTs). This includes championing efforts to promote mental health and wellbeing throughout the school community.
The Oxford Impact study gives several recommendations for implementing a whole-school intervention or strategy for promoting wellbeing, for it to have positive effects on student academic and other outcomes.
Some of the key advice from multiple authors based on empirical evidence suggests that schools should...
At iSAMS, we developed our Wellbeing Manager module to help schools create a clear system for recording student concerns.
Key features include:
One of the strengths of the iSAMS MIS (Management Information System) is the ability to pull information from other areas of the system. With this in mind, we reviewed the Wellbeing Manager module to see how we could make use of the data in iSAMS to provide staff with useful insights into student behaviour.
We created workflows to enable school staff to identify trends that indicate a wellbeing concern or an achievement. If a student exhibits a pattern of behaviour, such as frequently being late to (or absent from) lessons, a workflow can be created that triggers an ‘indicator’ (or notification) for relevant staff members, empowering them to act on the issue immediately.
Workflows can therefore eliminate the need for staff to manually run reports by automating the process, saving a considerable amount of time and bringing key data to light immediately.