Whole-school approach

To achieve Healthy Schools status, your school will need to adopt a whole-school approach. This involves addressing the needs of pupils, the staff and the wider community not only within the curriculum, but across the whole-school and learning environment.

The whole-school approach aims to develop an ethos and environment in a school that supports learning and promotes the health and well-being of all. This can be achieved through a whole-school approach to ten over-arching areas of school improvement:

• leadership, management and managing change
• policy development, relevant to areas of focus
• curriculum planning and resourcing, including working with external agencies
• teaching and learning
• school culture and environment
• giving pupils a voice
• provision of pupils’ support services
• staff professional development needs, health and welfare
• partnerships with parents/carers and local communities
• assessing, recording and reporting pupils’ achievement.

Each of these areas will need to be applied to the four themes, namely personal, social and health education (PSHE), healthy eating, physical activity and emotional health and well-being (EHWB).