At TDT’s upcoming conference, I will be part of a panel discussing how looking after and developing our staff can create resilient, thriving, expert schools. Here I look at the opportunities and challenges of creating a meaningful wellbeing culture across a Trust and I suggest some key leadership commitments, actions and philosophies that can underpin it.
As is often the case in our modern society with disruptive ideas and concepts, ‘wellbeing’ has risen in prominence, been adopted and adapted, and come out the other side as a ‘buzzword’ that engenders as many weary sighs as it does expressions of approval, all in the blink of an eye. So what is wellbeing, and why does it matter?
There are many definitions of ‘wellbeing’. The World Health Organisation(1) defines it as: ‘encompassing quality of life and the ability of people and societies to contribute to the world with a sense of meaning and purpose’. I have always found the most useful framing to be the idea that “wellbeing is the balance between the personal resources we have and the challenges we face”, which I first heard from Paul Farmer, former Chief Executive of MIND when we were part of the Department for Education’s Expert Advisory Group on school staff wellbeing(2).
There is mounting research evidence of the impact wellbeing has on all elements of our children’s education(3) and school staff performance(4) to back up the anecdotal observations and evidence. Increasingly it is accepted that wellbeing is crucial to learning, attendance, behaviour, recruitment, retention, and performance, not to mention mental and physical health.
