St Matthias Academy passes Advanced Mental Health and Wellbeing Badge

We’re really excited to announce that we have passed the Mental Health and Wellbeing badge of the Healthy Schools Awards! We are only the second school in the city to pass this new award, which included work with the young people to build confidence and resiliency skills.   

We worked hard with staff and students to make fundamental improvements to our unstructured times in the day to ensure students have enough to keep them occupied. We have improved our life skills teaching, with sessions about personal finance, budgeting and planning for our futures.

The Healthy Schools Team said of our submission: “We were impressed by your use of a validated assessment tool (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) to assess the needs of your school population and to decide the focus for the advanced badge (improving children’s resilience). We are pleased going forward that you will continue to use this to screen your pupils so you are able to identify children in need of more support. We were also pleased to see that the interventions were planned in conjunction with your school’s Link Educational Psychologist and rooted in the evidence base around what works to improve children’s resilience.”

Getting the award is the first step in a long commitment to improving mental health and wellbeing in our academy.