This section will help you to:
Each school's priorities for wellbeing will be different. Schools promote wellbeing through their vision, values and strategic priorities, and through the deliberate design of their curriculum. At the same time schools are also responding to emerging wellbeing issues and concerns. Their evaluation and inquiry activities focus on the impact of specific strategies or initiatives being implemented for students needing additional support or in some cases access to specialist support.
ERO's report Wellbeing for Young People's Success at Secondary School (February 2015) describes the ways in which schools addressed student wellbeing, modifying the Intervention Triangle 1 as a 'promoting and responding triangle' (Figure 1) that describes the provision of support for all students and for particular groups of students.
ERO's report Wellbeing for Children's Success at Primary School (February 2015) points out that schools that promoted wellbeing in their culture, curriculum and approaches were more able to respond to a traumatic event than schools that hadn't promoted wellbeing.
Schools' internal evaluation and inquiry processes need to focus on the effectiveness of what they are doing to promote wellbeing for all students. Schools cannot simply rely on their positive culture and respectful relationships to promote wellbeing but need to provide opportunities for students to make decisions about their wellbeing and to be active in leading their learning.
This resource provides guidance for schools about how to include a focus on student wellbeing in their ongoing evaluation and inquiry processes. Such processes enable schools to systematically identify, prioritise, learn from and modify strategies to improve student wellbeing. It uses the framework of learner-focused evaluation processes and reasoning from the joint Ministry of Education and ERO publication Effective School Evaluation: How to do and use internal evaluation for improvement.2
Evaluation and inquiry processes can be driven by questions such as:
> Is what we are doing to promote and respond to student wellbeing working?
> Is it good enough?
> How do we know?
> Can we do better?