A Healthy School

Silver Award achievement.

Mrs Costello, Form Teacher Prep II and PSHE Lead for Preps and Pre-Preps and Juniors, was the bearer of exciting news last week about our participation in Healthy Schools.  She takes up the story:

‘I am delighted to announce that St Augustine’s Priory has achieved a Healthy Schools London Silver Award. This is an award scheme sponsored by the Mayor of London, which recognises and celebrates schools that are involved in a programme to support their pupils becoming healthier.

To attain the award, schools are required to undertake a needs analysis that identifies action that will help pupils to achieve and maintain good health and wellbeing.  An action plan for development and delivery of these key areas is required and the outcomes must be measurable.

In the summer term, ‘Relationships’ is the topic covered in our PSHEE (Personal Social Health Economic) curriculum and this includes Relationships and Sex Education (RSE).  At St Augustine’s Priory we recognise the importance of high quality, comprehensive and consistent RSE across the school so consequently we chose this as the focus for development for our Silver Award.

With the help of the Ealing Health Improvement Team we have produced a programme to work with staff, parents and pupils to meet our objectives. We aim to provide lessons where pupils will be able to ask questions and talk about concerns or anxieties they have relating to puberty and growing up, thus reducing levels of worry.  We also have a workshop for parents planned where we will have an opportunity to share what is being taught in RSE and discuss how parents can support this at home. Through this work we hope to increase the percentage of children who learn about RSE from home or school, ideally through a combination of both.

Last year many parents attended the excellent workshop led by Stacey Edmead Payne (Ealing Children’s Mental Health Officer) who spoke about Mental Health.  This year, as part of our Healthy Schools Award programme there will be a parent workshop entitled ‘My Body, My Rules’ focusing on RSE. This will also led by the Ealing Health Improvement Team.  We hope that many parents will be able to attend as it will be an interesting and very valuable evening – we will inform you of the date in the near future.  We are sure that parents and girls alike will benefit greatly from this programme.’