Keep well, schools and kura

By Heather Barker Vermeer

Industry Reporter Schools are renowned for being resourceful, but it is essential that they have the time and budget required to deliver adequate wellbeing support as continued PLD and community buy-in is essential if we want to ensure equitable access to thriving pandemic recovery and sustainable wellbeing education.

Educator Wellbeing

Some schools are choosing to innovate and produce bespoke resources for teachers themselves.

Auckland's Sancta Maria College chose to address staff wellbeing aft er teachers were found to be experiencing workload intensity, demands on time and an unbalanced approach. They created their own mental health wellbeing booklet to help staff develop new habits to look aft er themselves, containing weekly activities, tips, and strategies. Tailoring solutions to your school’s particular scope of need can increase ownership, buy in, and achieve the aim of bett er wellbeing outcomes. Staff surveys can be a way to start a conversation and begin to address any wellbeing imbalances across teaching, leadership, and support teams.

By asking the right questions around mood, productivity, pressure and perspective, staff can be encouraged to share not only what they feel are the problems, but brainstorm solutions.

Organisations like Workplace Wellbeing can provide holistic assessments, strategies, and programmes that combine fun challenges and team activities, leadership training, and help your school develop its own support network for staff .

Student Wellbeing

How does your school assist students to manage their emotions, maintain their focus, build relationships, and improve their coping skills in diff erent situations? Free resources are available from such campaigns such as Pause Breathe Smile, with a raft of tools for students to use and teachers to introduce, such as guided mindfulness practices, classroom activities like creating mind jars, balloon breathing, and gratitude experiments. Leading the charge in ensuring student wellbeing is Jase Williams. The Principal of Henry Hill School in Napier and his team received the latest Prime Minister’s Excellence in Education Wellbeing Award for their outstanding work in this space. Williams has immersed himself in trauma informed practice learning and has become one of only three people in Aotearoa to be qualifi ed in the Neurosequential Model in Education, and the only Māori certifi ed in this approach in the world.

Book your Wellbeing Workshop

• Boost your energy and your immune system • Strategies to reduce stress and burnout • Don’t worry, Be happy - positive psychology • Sleep smarter strategies • Having check-in conversations • Mindfulness made easy

To book a workshop call: 03 374 6465 www.workplacewellbeing.co.nz

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A Whole-School Approach

Showing true hands-on investment in community and whanau being has seen Principal Williams and his team immerses whānau in learning experiences through a Community Day, shift ing away from the classic student/parent conference has led to a 100 percent att endance rate. Each month, the ‘Dad’s and Mum’s Hui’ at school gives staff a chance to share this Kaupapa and starting each day with yoga, student-led and facilitated in Te Reo Māori schoolwide, also sets a calm tone for the school day. It is followed by karakia, and Williams says the school has also added ‘strategic and planned regulatory breaks’. “This is to reset our brains to intake more cognitive content and to aid in transitioning between activities. We share with our kids what’s happening and going on inside their brains when they’re upset, angry, frustrated, and anxious, and they know ways how to self-regulate.” Creating a large quiet place in the school where students can go during learning time or breaks ‘to regulate themselves’ has proven benefi cial, as has the introduction of their awardwinning Sensory Garden: Te Āhuru Mōwai, which includes “a large and winding sensation pathway fi lled with all kinds of textures and elements designed to stimulate the brain,” says Williams. Mental health was a key priority in the Government’s Wellbeing Budget this year. Aft er coming under fi re for a slow rollout out of support services to schools, it pledged to pump more funding into providing help, more quickly. There are school wellbeing support services being expanded across fi ve more regions thanks to a $90m budget funding boost. Children in Northland, Counties Manukau, Bay of Plenty, Lakes and the West Coast will soon benefi t from this, aft er 10,500 children were given access to psychologists, counsellors, social and youth workers at school in classroom, group, and individual sett ings in Canterbury region. Mental health support will continue to be provided through the Ministry of Education in schools and kura across these areas through to the end of 2024. Also, supported by a $47.6m government investment between 2020 and 2024, Sport New Zealand have developed a raft of whole-school resources as part of the Healthy Active Learning initiative, designed to improve the wellbeing of tamariki through healthy eating, drinking and quality physical activity.

Boys will be boys mindful

How can we help mindfulness resonate with young boys, especially if they’re bored, resistant, or suspicious of their feelings?

We spoke to Gavin Hughes, Year 5 teacher at Wellesley College, Lower Hutt , who has been teaching Pause Breathe Smile for eight years, most of that time been exclusively to boys. Gavin brings a guy’s perspective as someone who has uses mindfulness personally. He also knows all too well the challenges that Kiwi boys and men face with their mental health and emotional wellbeing. Gavin was profoundly impacted by the death of his mother when Gavin was just 13 years old. Back then, there weren’t many men talking openly about their feelings and how they’re really doing. Initially he quashed the feelings and grief; it was only when he had children of his own that he spoke with a professional about processing his loss. Now teaching at a boys’ school, Gavin takes seriously his position to be a role model and to combat the widespread mental health challenges that Kiwi men face. Being transparent about his own experiences with stress, emotions, and anxiety, both from the past and current, is part of how Gavin gets his Wellesley students to ‘buy in’ to mindfulness. “I want them to see it isn’t just something you do at school. It’s something adults use and that it’s benefi cial for them over time, not just at school and in this class,” says Gavin. To get hesitant or resistant boys to see the value of becoming more aware of their feelings and thoughts, Gavin draws them in with the idea of a challenge. “I tell them that to sit and focus your mind on your breathing is a challenge – a hard thing to do, not natural to do,” explains Gavin. For instance, they might hear a distracting sound like a basketball bouncing, a door slamming, or voices in the corridor, but he encourages them to "hear and see things as a distraction that’s trying to pull you away.” It’s a “competition within themselves.”

Gavin sees major benefi ts for his students from using mindfulness. One student would get very frustrated and would yell and scream as an outlet, unable to regulate his big emotions. Eventually, with Pause Breathe Smile and some extra work with him, this boy learned to recognize his triggers and “when his emotions were taking over.” He had learned some “skills to sit down and do his breathing or go for a walk, hold a leaf in his hand and examine it,” says Gavin proudly. “Seeing him get that was one of the best moments of my work with Pause Breathe Smile.”

Gavin’s stories from using Pause Breathe Smile with his boys are reiterated in fi ndings from an independent research study of PBS schools. Three out of 4 teachers in the study said that Pause Breathe Smile had helped their male students bett er describe their feelings and understand the feelings of others, the core of empathy. The Ihi research study, which captured the thoughts of 143 teachers and 58 children, found that PBS strengthened schools’ “cultures of care,” positively impacting classrooms, playgrounds, staff rooms, and beyond. In the past few decades, much has changed for guys in recognising the importance of noticing and talking about their lives and emotions. “A lot of men are starting to talk about their feelings. When I go out with friends, go for a mountain bike ride, it’s become normal to talk about challenges and things that aren’t going so well,” says Gavin. It’s “important for [my students] to see that as something masculine, that it’s something everyone should be doing,” not just girls and women.

Gavin remains committ ed to using mindfulness in his own life and with his students at Wellesley College. “We’re making inroads in NZ mental health but not to the extent that we need to,” says Gavin. “I’m going to go carry on with my practice of role modeling and promoting mindfulness in the school, because it’s important to do something to actually address the problem we’ve got in NZ” with mental health in boys and men.

Gavin Hughes, Year 5 teacher, Wellesley College, Lower Hutt