Mental Health and Wellbeing

Health and Wellbeing at school

At Portway Primary School, our commitment to keeping our children safe, and providing the best possible environment in which every child is cared for and able to learn and grow, underpins all our teaching and learning.

Part of this commitment includes ensuring that we actively nuture our children’s physical and mental health.  To support this commitment, we:

• Work with Whole Child Therapy through which we make a range of therapies available to our children and their families to support their wellbeing.
• Work with Place2Be, a leading children’s mental health charity, which has an office at school.  Children are able both to self-refer, and be referred by teachers.
• Work with Newham’s School Health team, which provides a number of emotional and physical well-being services to our children and their families.
• Work with Newham’s SEND 0-25 service, which provides a variety of programmes for children with more complex learning and health needs, including those with disabilities.
• Work with our Gardener in Residence, Cassie Liversidge, whose work with the children in the school garden is structured to ensure that it is fully integrated with the classroom-based curriculum, giving the children real world experiences with gardening and plants.
• Work with PE specialists to ensure that our games and activities curriculum is challenging and engaging for all children, encouraging children to use their bodies, and to experience the thrill of competing.

In June 2020, through our membership of the Wellbeing for Schools Award programme, developed in partnership with the National Children’s Bureau, we achieved external recognition of  our approach at school, in which the wellbeing of children and staff is the first consideration in everything we do.  The award recognises all the work described above that we have done to date, and also considers staff wellbeing, which is a key focus of our School Leadership Team.  The award aims to ‘promote positive social and emotional wellbeing, mental health and wellness for pupils and staff in your school’.  The award also emphasises actively listening to the needs of staff and parents; in May 2018, we undertook a survey of our children, parents and staff to understand their views of our school, the results of which (for parent and children) are published as a document to download on this page.

Through our achievement of this award, we have:

• Demonstrated our commitment to promoting mental health as part of school life;
• Worked to continually improve the emotional wellbeing of our children and our staff;
• Ensured that all mental health problems/concerns are identified early and appropriate support is put in place;
• Continually reviewed and refined our provision of interventions so that they best serve the needs of our children and our staff;
• Built on the work that we have already done to engage the whole school community in the importance of mental health issues, using appropriate technologies to make this an easy process for children to engage with;
• Continued to seek, capture and analyse the views of parents, children and staff around mental health issues, which we will use to review our current performance and inform our planning.

This page was last updated in July 2023.