Abstract
Giving children a voice is purportedly a key tenet of education policy, practice and research. Nonetheless, ensuring that voice is meaningfully included and responded to in the spaces that children occupy remains a challenge. This chapter considers children’s voice with respect to developing evidence-informed, socially valid, mental wellbeing strategies in schools. The pivotal role of schools in supporting pupils’ mental wellbeing is well-documented and they are considered the ideal setting for preventative approaches and early intervention. Whilst the new relationships and health curriculum in England puts schools firmly in the spotlight, many staff feel overwhelmed and ill-prepared to deal with their responsibility for supporting pupils’ mental wellbeing with growing concerns for staff’s own wellbeing. Alongside this, school leaders are challenged with implementing effective and appropriate wellbeing strategies with limited knowledge in this domain, prompting calls for case studies of good practice for schools to share. With this in mind, LifeMosaic, an innovative wellbeing app. – designed, developed and evaluated through a pupil-teacher partnership – is presented in this chapter. The case study serves to demonstrate how child-to-child and child-to-adult collaboration, co-creation and social action can be harnessed to design authentic, child-centred approaches to support mental wellbeing which benefit the whole school community.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘children’ used throughout the chapter includes young people.
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Jayman, M., Potapov, K. (2022). Re-imagining Mental Wellbeing Strategies in Schools. In: McLellan, R., Faucher, C., Simovska, V. (eds) Wellbeing and Schooling. Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Educational Research, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95205-1_12
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