Who is this template for?
This template is designed for school leadership teams in Wales, including the Headteacher, Senior Leadership Team (SLT), and the Behaviour Lead. It provides a structured process to evaluate and strengthen the school's whole-school approach to emotional and mental wellbeing.
Why use this template?
This template provides a clear, strategic framework to ensure your school’s approach to wellbeing is proactive, comprehensive, and aligned with the principles outlined by Public Health Wales.
- Bring Clarity and Focus: It breaks down the complex, vital area of mental and emotional health into manageable components, helping you to systematically review your provision and embed wellbeing as a core priority.
- Foster a Culture of Belonging: The template encourages you to evaluate the core elements of a positive school culture, such as building strong relationships, establishing trust, and promoting a connected school community where everyone feels valued.
- Prioritise Staff Wellbeing: It places a crucial emphasis on supporting the wellbeing of your staff, recognising that their health is fundamental to creating a positive learning environment for pupils.
- Drive Meaningful Improvement: Moving beyond a simple audit, the process helps you create a clear, actionable improvement plan that is directly informed by your self-evaluation, ensuring the mental and emotional health of pupils and staff is effectively cared for.
- Promote an Evidence-Based Approach: It encourages you to ground your judgements in evidence, helping you to understand the real-world impact of your strategies and make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts.
How does it work?
This template uses the intuitive, step-by-step iAbacus process to guide you from reflection to action. You will evaluate your school's performance across the key domains of a whole-school approach, making judgements against the following levels: Emerging, Embedding, Excelling.
The key areas evaluated are:
- Leadership and Commitment
- Emotional and Mental Well-being Needs of Learners and Staff
- Involvement and Engagement
- Supporting Staff to Maintain their Well-being
- Importance of Relationships
- Help and Support Services
- School Environment and Facilities
- Curriculum
Gaining Strategic Insight
For a MAT CEO or Director of Education, iAbacus provides an invaluable strategic overview. By using the 'Stack' feature to compare the 'Emotional health and mental wellbeing' abacuses from each academy in the trust, you can quickly gain a trust-wide perspective. This allows you to identify schools that may require targeted support, pinpoint successful strategies in high-performing schools that can be replicated across the group, and ensure a consistently high standard of wellbeing for all.
Clear, Professional Reporting
With a single click, your evaluation can be exported into a polished, visually compelling PDF report. For a MAT Trust Board reviewing trust-wide performance, a report generated from a 'Stack' or 'Overlay' offers a powerful, comparative overview to inform strategic decisions. For Headteachers and the SLT, reports are perfect for sharing with staff to show how the school is meeting the emotional needs of staff and pupils, and to facilitate collaborative brainstorming on how to improve further.
References / Source Material
How to Get Started
New to iAbacus? Discover how this template can support your improvement strategy. Book a personalised demo or start a free trial to explore the full platform. Visit www.iAbacus.com to learn more.
Already a subscriber? You can find this template in the template library within your iAbacus account. Simply log in, create a new abacus, and select it from the list to get started.
