"Kindness is free, sprinkle that stuff everywhere."

At East Huntspill Primary, we aim to promote positive mental health and well-being for our whole school community (children, staff, parents and carers). We understand the importance of positive mental health and understand that this is just as important as physical health.

Our role in school is to ensure that children are able to manage times of change and stress, and that they are supported and can access help when they need it. We are striving to ensure that children learn what they can do to maintain positive mental health, what affects their mental health, how they can help reduce the stigma surrounding mental health issues, and where they can go if they need help and support.

Children and young people may experience a wide range of social and emotional difficulties which manifest in many ways. These may include becoming withdrawn or isolated, as well as displaying challenging, disruptive or disturbing behaviour. These behaviours may reflect underlying mental health difficulties such as anxiety or depression, self-harm, substance misuse, eating disorders or physical symptoms that are medically unexplained. Other children and young people may have disorders such as attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder or attachment disorder.

As a school, we ensure that Social, Emotional and Mental Health are at the heart of our school. We aim to support children in recognising their emotions and develop strategies to regulate their emotions and have a toolkit of calming activities. We ensure that we enable children to have the time and space to regulate their emotions and practice de-escalation strategies to enable them to be ‘Ready to Learn’. We have dedicated staff who have accessed a range of training opportunities to embed interventions such as Thrive and Forest School.

We support children’s mental health in school in a number of ways:

All our staff support children’s wellbeing through strong caring relationships and our child-centred positive behaviour policy.

Our Learning Mentor, who is our senior mental health lead, works closely to support children’s emotional needs using Thrive Approach, offering nurturing SEMH sessions.

Our PSHE lessons support emotional well-being and encourage children to learn about physical and mental health.

Well-being, forest school and gardening after-school enrichment clubs throughout the year.

Mental Health support from MHST for children and families. Please click here for more information. 

Managing Medication and First Aid in School 

We understand there are times when a child has a medical condition and needs to be supported to ensure they have access to school life by having medicine during school hours.  We are only able to administer medicine if it is prescribed by a doctor. Please click on the attachment below for our procedure for managing medications in school.  We require any medication to be handed to the school office and a consent form completed by a parent which provides all the details required to administer the medicine safely by a first aid trained member of staff.

We actively encourage our pupils to engage in their surroundings and active play. Sometimes we need to administer first aid to pupils for any accidents and injuries that may occur in school time. We have nominated first-aiders who are trained to deal with injuries. A record of any accidents or first aid will be reported via a first aid slip in your child's book bag. In the event of a bumped head or a more serious injury, we will call parents to let you know and, if deemed necessary, you may be asked to collect them from school, or seek further medical support.