Pastoral Care and Wellbeing at the Secondary Campus

This article is intended to give you an overview of the Pastoral Care and Wellbeing provision available to the students at our Secondary Campus.

Jake McIntosh, Assistant Headteacher Secondary (Wellbeing)

Hello parents and guardians, this article is intended to give you an overview of the Pastoral Care and Wellbeing provision available to the students at our Secondary Campus.

Monitoring the wellbeing of students

Children are faced with an increasing number of challenges nowadays and anxiety is increasing at a rapid rate. Leading educators around the world have realised it is imperative that we are able to track and monitor the wellbeing of children, and to be able to proactively intervene when challenges arise.

Educators are increasingly aware of the importance of teaching children specifically about their wellbeing, allowing them to understand more about the challenges they face and the steps they can take to tangibly improve their wellbeing. At Bangkok Prep we were tasked with finding a solution to both of those issues.

We wanted to be able to track and monitor the wellbeing of children and to have the data to spot trends proactively. We also wanted to use that data to teach children about the issues they are facing and how they could actively intervene themselves. We partnered with a software provider called YouHQ.

YouHQ is a wellbeing platform that is available to all of our students in Years 7-12. Some of the features available to them are:

• Wellbeing checking / surveys - at each login students are asked a set of questions about their wellbeing. Surveys rotate upon login but are well researched and designed by organisations such as the World Health Organisation.
  
  Counsellors and Pastoral Leads are alerted if responses change significantly from previous surveys.
  
  

• Goal setting - goal setting is a key factor for children achieving their full potential. Each term we ask students to set goals based on our new effort matrix.
  
  These sessions allow students to understand deeply what good effort at school means and to work towards making specific improvement in their effort scores on school reports.
  
  This term students have set a goal based on being a self-motivator.
  
  

• Wellbeing education - when students are logged into YouHQ they have access to an amazing library of wellbeing resources which are all based on the market leading model for wellbeing - PERMAH. Resources are automatically suggested to students based on the results from their wellbeing check-ins and surveys, or they can access resources on any topic they wish by searching. Students are rewarded for completing goals or completing lessons making this process a rewarding way of gaining new and very important skills.

Pastoral Support Structures

At Bangkok Prep we pride ourselves on having well defined, robust, support systems available to students. We promote a mantra of: “Everyone is a Pastoral Carer” ensuring all of our student facing members of staff are trained, able and confident to support our students with whatever needs they may have.

Students are always encouraged to speak with their ‘trusted adult’ emphasising that relationships with key support figures can develop as teachers, Form Tutors or other means.

• The Second Form Tutor System - Every school student in the world has a Form Tutor or Homeroom teacher, but very few have two.
  
  

This is what we have achieved at Bangkok Prep over the last two years.

We felt that one of the highest impact positive influences our Form Tutors were able to have with students was a one-on-one focused meeting. Sometimes these meetings are guiding children to navigate difficult friendship issues, or other times guiding them to set habits that will help them improve academically. Having a Second Form Tutor allows greater flexibility for these meetings to happen, and increases the number of trusted adult connections students have.

The Form Tutor and Second Form Tutor support is often the first level of support available to students. We always encourage regular communication between parents and guardians and Form Tutor, and should parents or guardians feel they have a concern about their child’s academic progress or wellbeing at school, we recommend organising a time to meet with your child’s Form Tutor.

Our Year Leaders are the key drivers of Pastoral Care within the Secondary School. These are highly skilled middle leaders who are visionary, supportive and have eyes and ears everywhere. Our Year Leaders look for macro trends within cohorts and structure our enrichment curriculum so that it supports the challenges our students encounter.

Our school counsellors work closely with the Pastoral Teams and with two school counsellors available to our Secondary students, there is both variety and diversity within the team.

Our school counsellors proactively meet with all new students, and reach out to those students that show signs of needing someone to speak with. Children are given the flexibility to make their own appointments with our counsellors and can do this by emailing them directly.

Any meeting between a student and a counsellor is confidential, unless there is immediate danger to that student.

  Claire Ireland                   Elliot Whitecross  

Our Safeguarding team has expertise in a range of different areas including Online safety and the threats posed to children online.

The safeguarding team has the incredibly important job of ensuring that every Bangkok Prep student is kept safe and risk-free and that any risks to that safety are managed in a confidential and appropriate manner.

The safeguarding team can be contacted on their generic email address (safe@bkkprep.ac.th) or any individual in the team below is more than welcome to speak with our community.

Our Head of Sixth Form and Assistant Head Wellbeing, as well as all members of the Senior Leadership Team are highly trained to lead and monitor Safeguarding and Wellbeing in International Schools and are experienced and with the expertise to lead their expansive teams. At Bangkok Prep we understand that ensuring our students are safe and happy is the first step in supporting their academic success.

We have a highly skilled staff, who are pastorally focused and willing and able to support your children with any of the challenges they face. We encourage open communication between school and home to foster the best support for our wonderful young people.

Our CIS Development Initiative - Wellbeing

As part of Bangkok Prep’s ongoing accreditation with CIS, we are undertaking 4 exciting, community-inspired, development initiatives that are aimed at improving our school in critical areas. Development initiative number 1 is about wellbeing and aims to: “Empower our community to take agency and ownership of their wellbeing”.

Amongst other key objectives we would like to define what wellbeing means in the Bangkok Prep sense, and ensure we have some guiding principles that will guide future decision making. We would love to have our parent community involved in this project. If you would like to join the working group then please contact Jake McIntosh with an expression of interest (jmcintosh@bkkprep.ac.th)