23 August 2024

Many of you spent time in classes this week chatting with your child about their learning and progress and heard from them 'first hand'. I'm pretty sure there will have also been emphasis on the social emotional side of learning and elements of our Positive Education programme shining through. Our 'Pos Ed' goals for this year are:

• To improve student self-knowledge of their individual strengths and build self-esteem and confidence.

• To increase student’s ability to form positive relationships by increasing empathy and pro social behaviours.

• To continue to build restorative practices and I am powerful planning into everyday business as usual.

• To focus on areas of engagement and perseverance (based on 2023 EPOCH results).

EPOCH, if you are wondering, is a tool we use for our Year 5-6 and adapt to a small number of questions for others at the end of each year. See more here.

This information is just a piece of the pie, the sprinkles on the cupcake! The rich data comes from observations and conversations with the children and yourselves. Even watching them prepare for the Learning Celebrations, how the children handle goal setting, how prepared they are to try something new, mistake making, managing emotions.... the list goes on. I would never purpose to draw a fully solid straight line between social and emotional wellbeing and academic performance as there is a lot of other 'stuff' in the mix but who would not want their children to be building towards demonstrating big muscles in BOTH AND over time? This is where our school comes into its own, celebrates our work beyond the boundary and is recognised by many colleagues as being an organisation that's very proactive in learning and teaching  the whole child!

With a desire to keep learning and growing my own knowledge, I came across the recent 'World Happiness Report' this week. It's jam packed full of graphs and numbers and plenty of words but the piece I was really interested in is where our country rates compared to the past and also whether there is anything happening with our teenagers as the subject of the impact of a global pandemic and flow on effects on them is often surfacing.

So, delving into the report, I could see that "Happiness fell significantly in the country group including the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand by twice as much for the young as for the old". For example, aged below 30 we are ranked at 27th, and aged 60 and over we are ranked at 6th. The other sentence that stood out for me (and knowing that negative emotions can also be helpful to us at times) was that negative emotions were, in every region, more prevalent for females than males - although the gender gap was largest at the higher ages.

As I say, I have skimmed through the report but for those of you with greater strengths in seeking and retaining detail, you may be interested in a closer look: https://worldhappiness.report. Always interesting..... let's keep Wellbeing in mind as we rev up towards the Arts Celebration. This is where some of our children will truly experience an opportunity to build those muscles!

The World Happiness Report is a partnership of Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the WHR’s Editorial Board. The report is produced under the editorial control of the WHR Editorial Board.