Pupil & Culture
HOW DOES ST CHRISTOPHER’S SCHOOL PRIORITISE
MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING? Gulf Insider speaks to Jamie O’Dowd, Assistant Head Teacher at the St. Christopher’s Senior School about their Enrichment programme, the importance of having happy students, and students’ mental health and wellbeing.
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an you briefly tell us about the school’s Enrichment programme and the recent changes that have been made?
The Enrichment programme is our version of PSAG. We deal with aspects of the child’s education that has to do with their moral, social, and cultural education – the kind of things that are not covered in the standard academic lessons. The improvements we have made include increasing our focus on a child’s wellbeing and mental health. There’s an old belief in teaching that if a student does well at school, they will achieve good grades, get a good job, and then they will be happy. What the industry is having to rethink is that – first and foremost – we need to ensure that young people are happy. Happy students achieve well in school. They achieve good grades, which will result in them getting better jobs and being happy.
What has been the response from the students since this programme has been implemented? Students have been fundamental in the redesign of Enrichment. We’ve consulted them at every stage and they told us that they wanted the skills and techniques to ensure that they could positively impact their own and other people’s happiness and wellbeing. Too often, mental health coverage in schools is about the negative end of the mental health spectrum, looking at the 8
Gulf Insider June 2022
Jamie O’Dowd conditions that can arise when mental ill health occurs. What we’ve tried to do is change our program to ensure that all students – regardless of their current mental health – have the skills needed to positively impact their own and others’ mental health and wellbeing. We find that they’re using the language and specific terminology to do with wellbeing and mental health with much more confidence. They’re more aware of the impact of their words and their actions on each other. It is now becoming a common language within the school that we all refer to.
When did mental health and wellbeing initiatives begin in St Christopher’s and why? Student wellbeing has always been highly prioritized at St Christopher’s. All the events we do outside of a classroom are to ensure that our students are happy, such as sports day, music and drama performances, dress up days, parties, and proms. The redesign of the Enrichment was done to just give this an explicit name and focus. We followed an evidencebased practice called positive education which prioritises wellbeing and mental health, and puts it at the very heart of
