Skip to content ↓

Health & Wellbeing

At Stepney Park, we recognise the important contribution school can make towards children's health and wellbeing. We provide a safe and secure environment for children to make friends, develop strong relationships with adults, try new things and learn what they can do to keep themselves safe and well. 

For the vast majority of children, this approach is enough to feel safe, included and happy in school. However, of course, sometimes things happen in our children's lives and this can affect their wellbeing, meaning they need some extra support. This can come in a range of forms, some of which are detailed below.

Learning about Health & Wellbeing

Children learn about health and wellbeing in a number of subjects across our curriculum:

  • Healthy eating. Children learn about healthy eating in science, and put this learning into practice in DT. Every year group from Y1 to Y6 has a cooking project in which they cook something healthy, refining the product over multiple attempts.
  • Physical exercise. Children learn about the importance of physical exercise in science and PE, and they have opportunities every day to be active at break, at lunch and in after school clubs.
  • Mental health. Our PSHEE curriculum includes learning about mental health and the important steps that we can all take to maintain our own wellbeing.

Supporting Transition

Some children find the transition into a new class with a new teacher particularly challenging. Every year we work hard to ensure that children are prepared for the move into their new class so that they can return to Stepney Park in September happy and ready to learn.

When children are new to our school from elsewhere, we make an extra effort to ensure they feel welcome and support them in the early days to begin to form friendships, for example by asking another child to act as their buddy. We regularly have children who join Stepney Park from abroad, perhaps without knowing any English. Our approach to this varies depending on the child's age, but we also prioritise building children's basic command of English to help them to settle in.

Additional Support

Some children need extra support to ensure their wellbeing, whether this be due to a special education need, an event in their life or a particular set of circumstances.

At Stepney Park, this support can come in a range of forms:

  • Informal support. For some children, informal support like regular check-ins or joining a lunchtime club is enough to give them the support they need.
  • ELSAs (Emotional Literacy Support Assistants). These members of staff have completed an extensive training programme with the Education Psychology service in Tower Hamlets and work with children 1:1 or in small groups. Their work is always bespoke to the needs of the child or children they are working with. 
  • Counsellor. We have a qualified counsellor, who works in school two days a week. He works flexibly so that we can best meet the needs of our children. This includes working directly with children and may include liaising with parents.
  • Educational Psychologists. We buy in a considerable amount of specialist Educational Psychologist (EP) time. This is used in a range of ways to support children’s behaviour, learning and wellbeing.  
  • Other agencies. In a small number of cases, the school is not able to give a child the support he or she needs. In these cases, we make may referrals to other agencies.

Cookie Policy