Mental Health & Wellbeing
At Royal Park, we are committed to supporting mental health and wellbeing for our children, staff and parents.We understand and respect that everyone experiences life challenges that can make us vulnerable at times and additional emotional support may be required.
We are dedicated to developing a culture that gets rid of the stigma that is attached with mental health. We want to raise awareness, develop confidence in all stakeholders to use a shared language and ensure that we spread the message that everyone has a role in promoting positive mental health.
At Royal Park, we want to ensure that children are able to manage times of change and stress and that they are supported to reach their potential or access help when they need it. We also want to ensure that children learn about what they can do to maintain positive mental health.
Our curriculum
Our curriculum has been designed to help expose our children to real life and current themes and topics. It is underpinned by a vocabulary rich text which promotes discussions and encourages our children to develop a voice. Helping our children to become confident in communicating their thoughts has a powerful impact on their mental health.
We have also dedicated our Tuesday assemblies to look at how the children can support themselves and each other.
Supporting the children's mental health
Along with our curriculum, we also have members of staff trained and qualified in supporting children with the mental health. We have five members of staff trained as mental health first aiders, two members of staff qualified in leading draw and talk sessions with children and four members of staff training in delivering lego therapy to the children.
We also have a our school dog Skye who comes in to work with many of our children. Some of our children are even qualified as an official dog mentor.
Zones of regulation
For the children to be able to build tools to support themselves, they first need to be able to identify the emotions that they are feeling. We have introduced the children to the Zones of Regulation.
The Zone of Regulation is identified as the best state of alertness of both the body and emotions for the specific situation. For example, when a child plays on the playground or in a competitive game, it is beneficial to have a higher state of alertness. However, that same state would not always be appropriate in the classroom. The lessons and learning activities are designed to help the children recognise when they are in the different Zones as well as learn how to use strategies to change or stay in the Zone they are in. In addition to addressing self-regulation, the children will gain an increased vocabulary of emotional terms, skills in reading other people’s facial expressions, perspective about how others see and react to their behaviour, insight into events that trigger their behaviour, calming and alerting strategies, and problem solving skills. The children will then build a tool box to support themselves which will enable them to self regualte when faced with challenges throughout their time at Royal Park Primary and when they move onto secondary school.
It is important to note that everyone experiences all of the Zones—the Red and Yellow Zones are not the “bad” or “naughty” Zones. The Zones of Regulation is intended to be neutral and not to communicate judgement.