Looking after the well-being of staff and girls at NGHS through the Positive Project. Guest blog by Olivia Dixon, Pastoral School Consultant Teacher.

As many of our parents and school community will be aware, we have been introducing the Positive Project across school over the past year or so. The Positive Project is a whole-school initiative that aims to promote and maintain the psychological health, well-being and resilience of all school members, particularly teachers and pupils. The project uses a range of different tools as well as App-based technology that is targeted towards creating a culture of emotional literacy.

This half-term has seen some really exciting developments for the Positive Project! We have introduced the first module – Awareness – along with the two tools (the Emotional Barometer and Inner Coach) which form the basis of this module. All pupils now have access to the Positive App and they have been regularly using the tools and resources during tutor time. It has been interesting to look back over the whole-school Emotional Barometer heat maps over the past few weeks and it is wonderful to see that we have now had over 1000 entries! This means that pupils are using the tool regularly, something that will really help them to recognise the things that trigger changes in their mood states. This, in turn, will help individual pupils to identify different strategies to help them to ‘bounce back’, consequently increasing resilience and promoting well-being across the school.

We are also working closely with the Pastoral Prefects in order to share the key messages of the Positive Project so far. They have created a fantastic display of well-being novels and non-fiction texts in the library and they will be working with individual tutor groups next half-term as we start to introduce the next few tools (the Positive Switch and Worry Filter) as part of the upcoming ‘Focus’ module.

Emotional health and well-being are seldom out of the news, and we at NGHS take this really seriously, so we’re thrilled to be on board with the Positive Project and seeing results already. The physical and mental health of our girls and our staff is of paramount importance in keeping the school a happy environment in which girls succeed and enjoy their education.

We welcome feedback and further thoughts on the project if you have any, so please do get in touch with school at enquiries@not.gdst.net if you have any further questions!