Wellbeing worldwide news

Here we will upload recent and relevant information about wellbeing research, policies and practice in education. Also, the last few relevant posts on the site are accessible by clicking on the link symbol (🔗) on the images at the bottom of this page.

You can read our most recent newsletter here: mailchi.mp/growinggreatschoolsworldwide/growing-great-schools-worldwide-newsletter-november-2019

We also want to share your stories – what has worked for you in helping young people and their teachers flourish? Register or login on the site to add your comments.

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Conferences

Upcoming Wellbeing conferences – please note we only tell you about WELLBEING conferences not those that say wellbeing but are actually about mental illness!

If you have a conference to add to this list, please let us know.

24^th January 2020, Kingston-upon-Thames: Sue Roffey: Using psychological intervention to improve outcomes for children and young people

29^th January 2020, Cardiff: Westminster Insight, Mental Health and Wellbeing in Schools Conference

2^nd-4^th and 6^th-7^th April 2020, Christchurch and Auckland, New Zealand: Sue Roffey & Denise Quinlan: Positive Education NZ: 4th Positive Education Conference

11^th-13^th May 2020: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Pan-Canadian Summit on K-12 Workplace Well-Being

24^th-27^th June 2020, Reykjavik, Iceland: the 10^th European Conference on Positive Psychology: Creating a World We Want to Live In

23^rd-24^th October 2020, Xi’an, China: Dehong Safe at School Conference keynote plus workshops

28^th-30^th October 2020, Xi’an, China: Sue Roffey: Circle Solutions Introduction and Trainer courses

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Whole school wellbeing

What Makes a Great School? Deconstructing the school-quality rankings that parents rely on — and finding a way to measure what matters: an excellent Oct 2017 article from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, all about measuring what we value, not valuing what we measure!

Test scores don’t tell us a tremendous amount about what students are learning in school.  … Even if scores did reflect what students were learning in school, they’d still fail to address the full range of what schools actually do.  … (M)y research team has found that high standardized test score growth can be correlated with low levels of student engagement. Standardized tests, in short, tell us very little about what we actually value in schools.

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Measuring wellbeing in primary schools – this guide is from the Evidence-Based Practice Unit in the UK

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The Ideal School Exhibition:  This paper from the RSA explores the experiences of schools in the UK that are bucking the trend and re-visiting the purpose, principles and power of education. It is a long read, but worth it!

This paper is about a group of schools that are bucking a growing and concerning trend: that of schools narrowing their focus, and hollowing out their teaching, in their desperation to meet the constantly shifting demands of the government’s accountability system.

This trend is understandable. The risks associated with leadership have become so high, with governors and trustees fearing for their schools and headteachers fearing for their jobs, that the task of clearing the latest threshold or hitting the next target has come to dominate almost everything many schools do; proof, if it were needed, that in high-stakes, low-trust systems, only those things that get measured tend to get done (with too few questions asked about how they get done).

But there are some school leaders who simply refuse to play this bureaucratic education-by-numbers game; leaders whose decisions are shaped, not by the government’s agenda, but by their own sense of mission – by the higher purpose to which they have dedicated themselves and their schools.

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Just before the previous UK election (May 2017), the House of Commons Education and Health Committees published a report on Children and Young People’s Mental Health – the Role of Schools, which leads off with this encouraging statement

We support a whole school approach that embeds the promotion of well-being throughout the culture of the school and curriculum as well as in staff training and continuing professional development.

We can but hope that this report is followed up with action. There have been a number of other reports on this subject over the last few years that are worth referring to in the same context: there are links to them here.

Teacher wellbeing

London’s City University have published a report on their Teacher Wellbeing Research – though this is geared more to measuring teacher stress rather than what to do about it: for the latter, you can start with Sue Roffey’s article for Education Canada: Creative Caring for Teachers: How a whole-school well-being approach can support everyone’s mental health  – then follow up with the links from our Teacher Wellbeing page …

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OFSTED inspection myths – this guide might improve the wellbeing of teachers preparing for an inspection!

School belonging

Social emotional learning

The problem with the concept of ‘grit’: read this article from Aeon: Teaching ‘grit’ is bad for children, and bad for democracy

There is a time and place for grit. However, praising grit as such makes no sense because it can often lead to stupid or mean behaviour. Duckworth’s book [Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance] is filled with gritty people doing things that they, perhaps, shouldn’t.

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Social and Emotional Skills are NOT “soft skills” … watch this excellent short video from Edutopia!

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Reports

The Children’s Society Good Childhood Report 2018 – This makes for challenging reading – but everyone concerned with young people and their wellbeing should do so. the_good_childhood_report_full_2018

RSPH and the Young Health Movement have published a report examining the positive and negative effects of social media on young people’s health. The report includes a league table of social media platforms according to their impact on young people’s mental health. YouTube topped the table as the most positive, with Instagram and Snapchat coming out as the most detrimental to young people’s mental health and wellbeing. You can download the report here.