A new wellbeing space

Longacre School has opened a new wellbeing space for pupils as part of the school’s focus on mental health and mindfulness. The ‘Bear Hut’, so called after the bear that features in the school’s logo, opened at the start of the Michaelmas term and is already proving popular with Longacre pupils.

We realised the children needed a space to come and talk about their feelings so I presented this idea to the PTA who naturally also saw the enormous value for the children. We then ordered our shepherd’s hut, spent the summer painting and furnishing it and now it is happily in action! We are so grateful to our PTA for their support and encouragement.

Children can come to the hut at break times and lunchtimes where a different member of staff is always on duty. Sometimes they just want some quiet time, sometimes they want to talk about changes at home or school and sometimes they want to share some happy event that is going on in their lives.

It was important to us that our Bear Hut sits in the centre of school; it is not hidden away. I believe strongly that mental health dialogue should be open and understood rather than hidden and shameful. All the children come to the hut happily and of their own accord, sometimes in groups to sort out friendship issues and sometimes alone to discuss something one-to-one. I’m so happy to see it being used consistently and to see children who came with something bothering them, coming back to the same teacher to let them know that their chat has helped sort it out.

We, as a school, wish to role model behaviour for our children so we have made mental health dialogue part of our form time and lessons and it has been so affirming to see that actually these young children do not naturally attach stigma to talking about their worries or anxieties; to them it appears more and more a natural part of their day – to share and listen in return.

Research by the charity YoungMinds has shown that 70% of children and young people who have experienced a mental health problem have not had appropriate interventions at a sufficiently early age and that children and young people who experience mental illness are more likely than other people to experience mental illness in adulthood. Creating the right environment for children is about creating the right physical environment as well as the right emotional environment.

The Bear Hut is also used for our very popular mindfulness club, art therapy sessions and for informal chats between parents, pupils and staff. We are very proud of the openness this has encouraged amongst the children and how our mental health has become as much of a focus as our physical health. We are lucky to have very supportive parents who have all firmly backed the hut and the benefit for their children.

The results of the hut are already evident with children across all the prep school year groups using it in one way or another. There has been an increase in children communicating their feelings, enabling any issues to surface before they become too internalised.

This has also been recognised in our recent AS Tracking data. AS Tracking is an online pupil-voice assessment which guides proactive, targeted, evidence based in school pastoral care. Half termly the prep school children take part in the online assessment and that data is analysed and fed back to us, providing an early detector to enable us to intervene gently to try and steer children to help choose the appropriate response for a particular situation at hand. This term’s AS Tracking has shown an increase in the amount of children who are sharing and discussing the way they feel which we hope is, in part, in relation to our Bear Hut and the increased awareness at school of emotional wellbeing.

Mr Moir, our Deputy Head, added: ‘The Bear Hut, combined with AS Tracking, has enabled us to identify, at a very early stage, those pupils who are at a hidden risk of developing social and emotional difficulties; we know how to help them and can track their progress over the coming terms. The aim is that working proactively and strategically will result in significantly reducing the number of pupils in need of critical pastoral support in the future.’

Our Headmaster Mr Bryan said: ‘We are really proud of Longacre’s commitment to pastoral care, mental health and wellbeing and would like to thank the PTA for their fantastic support with the Bear Hut and all our staff for their incredibly child-centred and caring approach.’

‘The Bear Hut is somewhere we all feel nice going to, it’s warm and comforting and there is always someone in there that is easy to talk to. It’s good to know that we can chat about anything and be listened to.’ – Form VI pupil at Longacre School

The Bear Hut is named after the Longacre School logo that came about via the school’s founder, Ursula Fairfax Cholmeley. Ursula is a Latin name for ‘little bear’. The motto of the school’s founder, ‘A happy heart goes all the way’, is still very much part of the school’s ethos.