Wellbeing Champions in Schools

What are Wellbeing Champions in schools?

The role of a wellbeing champion is to help promote positive mental health practices, encourage open and honest conversations about understanding mental health and share strategies for wellbeing. Wellbeing Champions can provide support and guidance to pupils or staff, and create an atmosphere of acceptance and understanding within the school. This is essential to create a positive whole-school approach to wellbeing.

Wellbeing Champions (sometime called Mental Health Champions) can be both pupils and staff members in primary schools, secondary schools or colleges, each playing their own unique role depending on their setting.

Pupil wellbeing champions can help reduce stigma around mental health within the school, provide support and guidance to fellow pupils, engage with students in a relatable manner and promote wellbeing strategies.

Staff Wellbeing Champions can provide peer support to each other or increase capcaity to support pupil mental health and wellbeing by working closely with pastoral members of staff.

Staff Wellbeing Champions In Schools

Wellbeing champions may not only be pupils, as part of your whole school approach to wellbeing you may also appoint a team of staff wellbeing champions. Staff or teacher wellbeing champions are individuals within the school, usually, teachers or non-teaching staff members, who have been designated as a point of contact to support pupil mental health or help reduce staff or teacher stress.

Staff wellbeing champions play a crucial role in supporting pupil mental health

Staff Wellbeing Champions are responsible for ensuring that students and staff feel supported when it comes to their mental health, and they should be available to listen to any concerns raised, as well as refer people to appropriate.  To do this they may need training in listening skills and how to share information on mental health awareness.

The staff mental health champion may be on hand to share strategies for wellbeing, signpost or reference to support services inside or outside of school.  They will work with the Senior Mental Health Lead to help them implement school-wide strategies for mental health and wellbeing.

Pupils or students must be made aware of who the Staff Wellbeing Champions are and how they can provide support to them. Depending on the size of your staff team, there may be different staff who are the wellbeing champions appointed to support colleagues or support pupils/students.

Tips for Establishing Staff Wellbeing Champions in Schools

These tips provide a few suggestions about how staff wellbeing champions could help your school

Decide the role and remit of Staff Wellbeing Champions

Would you like wellbeing champions to provide wellbeing advice and guidance, signpost staff to wellbeing services or simply provide listening support for their colleagues? Would you like them to support pupils and work more pastorally. Think about the needs of your school and the type of Staff Wellbeing Champions that will best suit your school/college.

Identify potential staff wellbeing champions

Who could you identify in your team who would be interested in this role?  We recommend you think carefully about who are the right people to help with this role. For example, people who are struggling with their own mental health may not want others to struggle and may be keen to be involved, but the added pressure of this role or the risk of over-empathising may put them more at risk of stress.

Provide enough time for staff wellbeing champions

We know that workload is one of the major causes of stress in schools as time pressures are a cause of many wellbeing issues. It is important to ensure that staff wellbeing champions have the time they need to support pupils and other school staff. Setting aside specific wellbeing time can help with this and encourage any wellbeing initiatives within the school.

To save time you may want to split the Staff Wellbeing Champions into subgroups to work on specific issues such as pupil mental health, marking and assessment, wellbeing events, curriculum, policy or workload. They don't all have to be involved in everything, they could even take it in turn in their role as staff wellbeing champions so they don't get overloaded with too much workload.

Provide training to your Staff Wellbeing Champions

It is important that staff who are the Wellbeing Champions feel confident and able to help provide mental health support. This may involve training and development to help increase team capability. Many Senior Mental Health Leads like to recruit and train their team of staff wellbeing champions choosing to use our Wellbeing Club programme resources to help with this process.

You may also want to train your team in our Staff Wellbeing Programme to help your staff wellbeing team learn how to help colleagues with their wellbeing and reduce stress.

Pupil Wellbeing Champions

Pupil wellbeing champions are a group of children or young people within a school or college environment who are dedicated to helping their peers and other students with their mental health and wellbeing.

Pupil wellbeing champions are a critical part of any whole-school approach to wellbeing and mental health. They are children and young people who have been appointed by staff or other pupils to help provide a safe, supportive environment for their peers. These wellbeing champions can provide advice and support to their peers, listen without judgement, and signpost them to appropriate wellbeing services.

Pupil wellbeing champions can help reduce stigma around mental health problems within the school. They have an important role in providing support and guidance to fellow pupils, engaging with students in a relatable manner and promoting wellbeing strategies and positive relationships.

Pupil Wellbeing Champions help peer wellbeing

Peer support programmes are an invaluable asset in the development of children and young people, providing guidance and ways that help them to grow emotionally, socially, and academically.

Peer support, for example providing peer pupil Wellbeing Champions, is an effective way of improving wellbeing amongst children, giving them someone who will listen when they may feel unable to go to an adult with their worries or concerns. This can be known as peer listening, buddying or peer mentoring.

As well as peer listening based support effective methods of peer support include pupils running mental health campaigns to increase awareness of support available to peers, organising drop-in sessions or designating an area in a school or college where their peers can go to find help/build friendships that support the development of wellbeing.

Scientific research has demonstrated that accessing the support of peers can boost resilience and wellbeing for children and young people, which is an essential component in fostering emotional health. Better resilience translates to better mental wellbeing and protects against the onset of mental health problems.

Training Wellbeing Champions in Schools

It is just as important to train your pupil wellbeing champions as it is your staff. You may not know where to start or what to include in a pupil Wellbeing Champion Training course or programme.  Find out more by accessing our Wellbeing Ambassadors Cheat sheet.

The Wellbeing Ambassadors Programme is an evidence-based, early prevention and positive outcomes programme developed through working with children and young people. The programme has been created for use within a school or other educational settings to train a member of staff, for example, a pastoral head or Senior Mental Health Lead to deliver training, based on coaching techniques, to a group of 8 – 16 students.

These students become the school’s Wellbeing Ambassadors – the training equips the student ambassadors with skills and techniques to support their peers through one-to-one support, drop-in sessions, or by sharing mental health and wellbeing strategies.

There are primary or secondary versions of the programme available so pupils of all ages can learn how to champion wellbeing through the Wellbeing Ambassadors Programme.

Find out about our pupil Wellbeing Champions programme for schools

Find out how to set up a peer support programme in your school by downloading our free peer support cheat sheet. Access free wellbeing activities to help your pupils.

If you’re interested in peer support to help in the early prevention of mental health problems in your young people and the impact of our Wellbeing Ambassadors programme download our FREE Impact Report, find out more about our Wellbeing Ambassadors Peer Support Programme here.