Staff Wellbeing

Staff Wellbeing at St Mary’s

Teaching and working in schools are a demanding and pressured career. It is important we make reasonable consideration to staff wellbeing to minimise the pressures on individuals.

Intent

At St Mary’s, we believe that staff need to be happy, have a manageable workload and the right support at all levels to thrive in a school.

Our intent is to ensure that we use well thought out systems and strategies are in place to ensure that when challenging times arise, staff are healthy and resilient and can be directed to extra support when needed.

At St Mary’s we make great efforts to foster a culture of happiness and wellness and are totally committed to ensuring staff stay happy and well, as this will lead to them providing the best possible education for our pupils.

Implementation

To achieve our aim of reducing teacher workload and positively impacting on mental health and well-being, school leaders have worked closely with the teaching staff to identify and improve areas that they felt were onerous, time-consuming or had little impact on pupils’ outcome. Solutions to the issues that arose, along with some additional ideas, have been implemented to improve happiness and well-being and make the role more manageable, whilst still having the maximum impact on pupil’s learning and progress.

The following strategies have been put in place to achieve this objective:

Planning	All staff have PPA time at the same time for communication, planning and preparation Support provided by SLT with a door open approach No expectation of detailed lesson plans Year and Subject leaders given additional time to monitor and assess their area of responsibility Teachers permitted to have their PPA time at home if required Shared planning across the year group Extensive resources purchased to help with planning process Trips planned on the teacher’s behalf
Communication	A ‘no emails after 7pm’ Shared school calendar so that the whole school has access and can book spaces and share events accordingly Weekly verbal and written briefings to keep staff up to date Good notice given with regards to any type of monitoring and the specific area of monitoring Annual ‘School information pack’ to inform staff of priorities, vision and ethos Weekly visitors, trips, staff absences and other events displayed in the staffroom
Meetings	Teacher Development Meetings (TDMs) are kept to a minimum (1x per week for 45mins) and may be split to accommodate training for specific phases Time to meet with teams on Monday mornings (Co Head assemblies)
New Staff	Comprehensive training packages delivered to all new teachers by a Co Headteacher Comprehensive training packages delivered to all new support staff by a phase lead or line manager ECTs are well supported by a tutor and a mentor and have access to an extensive training package
Social	Termly staff events, alternating between physical activities and social gatherings Recognition to religious celebrations (e.g. bringing in food)
Additional	Supportive on-site school well-being team available for staff to approach and confide in as and where required Free parking on site We have provided offices with printers to free up the main printer for teacher Allow staff time out to attend their child’s assemblies and plays in another school Reward for attending work everyday and reduce the stress for other staff

Impact

Through our commitment to staff wellbeing, we believe the impact will be:

Happy and content staff that enjoy working at St Mary’s.
Engaging, lively and effective lessons.
Happy and content pupils that enjoy coming to school
Staff retention is strong, providing consistent high-quality education to pupils.
Time saved and workload reduced for teachers.
Onerous tasks or tasks that produced little impact eradicated.

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