Health & Wellbeing in Integrated Learning Communities

Wow! There’s been sooo much going recently it’s hard to know where to start!

I’m pleased to say that my understanding is that the draft Curriculum for Excellence Health and Wellbeing Outcomes are due to be released on the 12th of May, we’re really looking forward to seeing them as an authority trialling them. So what is the future for Health Promoting Schools in all of this?

Well, as I’ve posted earlier we’re doing our best to ensure that we have a robust scheme to ensure that every school retains their status as a ‘Health Promoting School’. We are putting all our efforts into mainstreaming Health and Wellbeing as core business within the normal QA procedures, thus incorporating HPS. Every authority needs to ensure their schools are ‘Health Promoting Schools’ this now law within the new School Act.

To really make things as clear as day we’ve devised a simple flowchart to guide schools, located here. If we are serious about mainstreaming Health and Wellbeing, why does it need a seperate accreditation scheme? We don’t do that for numeracy or literacy?!

So here’s how the Highland scheme goes:

•  Schools will consider their progress since the original HPS accreditation and include a statement in their school improvement plan.
• The QIO will corroborate that based on their own visits and notify the Health Promoting Schools Manager
• A letter of congratulation will be sent to the school to confirm their status, the authority can then monitor the progress.

When we completed our Health Promoting Schools accreditation visits during 2005, we spent the whole day with every school in Highland ‘living and breathing’ a day in the school, meeting with parents, pupils and staff sharing the day and having a good laugh in most cases! The schools told us they really valued this as we gave positive feedback at the end of the day about all the work that they were doing that contributed to Health and Wellbeing, it was surprising to some who felt for the first time someone had come in and given them such welcoming feedback.

We’re still offering these visits as we believe that we are part of the process, identifying strengths in a school and feeding that back is our way in participating in the process of improving Health and Wellbeing. We have two schools who have been through this new process and it seems to work well. The great thing is..is that many more schools have requested the visits again as they appreciated them so much, great stuff, I’ll be on the road again. This is our way of ’sampling’ schools across the authority to monitor the process and progress of schools. If we believe a school requires a visit we can still request one. QIOs are really on board with this and will carry out Health and Wellbeing focussed visits.

I think this is a great way forward, I was even more delighted to see the lovely child friendly reports created by the Scottish Government on the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child.  They feature the fact that ‘Health Promoting Schools’ has played a part in ensuring young people are healthy. Having worked in this business for 15 years I’ve never seen Health and Wellbeing have such a high profile. If I had a tail it would be wagging…

 Pic: Abernethy Primary School on a health summer picnic.

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