Sunderland Healthy Schools approach

Sunderland Healthy Schools is based on a health behaviour change model.  It’s not about ticking boxes or trying to meet particular criteria, instead we are asking you to take a plan, do, review approach to Healthy Schools work.  These are the main 6 steps to achieving Healthy Schools success:

1.  Maintaining National Health Schools status

You should continue doing what you did to get Healthy Schools.  That means teaching good quality PSHE education, providing healthy school meals, working to tackle Anti-Bullying etc.  If you didn’t achieve National Healthy Schools please contact you Healthy Schools Coordinator before you start this new work.

2.  PLAN – Setting up a health and wellbeing group (HWBG)

This is good old fashioned project work and you will need a project group to help.  Pupils, staff, parents, governors – Who will help you achieve your goals?  You may decide to set up your group once you have seen the results of your data.  The first task of the HWBG should be to ensure that healthy schools status is being maintained (as per step 1), an audit checklist is available int he Sunderland Healthy Schools toolkit to help you.  This is for your reference however and does not need to be submitted as evidence.

3.  PLAN – Using health and wellbeing data

This is a really important stage.  A needs analysis is required to help you build a clear understanding of the health and wellbeing needs of the whole school community.  Your school will hold a variet of quantitive and qualitative data that is relevant to the health and wellbeing of children and young people.  Examples of quantitative data include attendance figures and data about fixed-term exclusions, take-up of school lunches, travel to school and behaviour, bullying and racist incidents.  Examples of qualtative data include children and young people’s perception and self reported behaviour from surveys, focus groups and interviews.  Data will enable the health and wellbeing group to decide which health and wellbeing priory is most pertinent to the school at that time.  In the future, you may find you need to consider other areas of health and wellbeing as a priority.

4.  PLAN – Setting meaningful outcomes (use planning template)

The next step is to define the specific impacts that your school plans to have on health and wellbeing; this will usually be over a period of one or two years.  The best way to do this is through outcomes.  Whenever possible, you should consider including outcomes that are targeted to specific groups of children and young people in challenging circumstances.  Once a priority has been chosen, we suggest you set a minimum of 3 meaningful outcomes, with 1 of these for a specific targeted group.

Meaningful outcomes are written as SMART (word).  Suggested wording is:

“To increase/decrease the number/% of children and young people who………….from……% to…….% by……..(date)”

5. DO – Action planning (use planning template)

This is when a lot of the work happens.  Careful selection and planning of activities/interventions will help ensure they have the desire impact.  Where possible, select activities for which there is evidence of impact achieved.  You may want to contact your Health Schools Coordinator for ideas of activities.

6. REVIEW (use school story template)

The purpose of the ‘REVIEW’ phase is to evaluate achievement of outcomes and review, share and celebrate your school’s improvements in children and young people’s health and wellbeing.  Your HWBG should look back at the action plans and assess what outcomes have been achieved.  The HWBG should also condiser what they have learnt fromt he process.