Happy Centred Schools, PSHE programme | Video intro - Part 3

Stephanie Davies, Laughology CEO, explains how the Happy-Centred School PSHE Programme works

Video Transcript

So when you’re ready to really start focusing on the themes, it’s up to you which theme you want to start with but what I would recommend is that the whole school starts one theme together so I would make sure that your boards out in your corridors have some displays on them about that particular theme, and I’d also make sure that you perhaps send a letter home to parents and talk about what theme your focusing on this. particular half term.

And within the resources, it's got some vocabulary that’s useful to use around that theme, and that can be sent home to parents as well to encourage them to use that vocabulary at home as well, so it becomes a whole community and a whole school practice. It’s also about teachers using that vocabulary in their school and in assembly’s as well.

So say for example the first theme that you’re focusing on is, for example, positive relationships, one of the ways to set that up is to use P for C around those themes. A little bit like what you’ve probably done in the first half term.

With the younger children, it might be that they draw some pictures on these about what that looks like, it might be that you help them to talk about what does it look like. Or I‘ve noticed that you’re playing nice with your friend there, that’s a lovely thing to do. Why do you do that? Encourage them to give you statements that you can write on and take photos and stick them on the leaves. And then those statements just go up, on your tree around the place for that particular theme.

Then once you start the lesson plans it will talk about what you might be looking for in that theme and what you're focusing on for that particular year group. And every single lesson plan also has what we call reward leaves, so these can be given out at any time right across the school curriculum when you notice a child being confident for something or having positive relationships, whatever theme it is that you’re focusing on for that half term these reward leaves should be given out because it brings the whole school curriculum into the happiness themes.

So this one here says this reward leaf has been presented to, and it says, for showing a great understanding of confidence. And when a child gets this, it might be they have it for showing a great understanding of confidence for doing math’s, you might add that on. So it’s really helping children to understand why they’ve shown confidence and being clear and writing that on even for the young children so they’re starting to get that. And then they get their name written on it and they pop that on their tree.

They can pop it on themselves, and the tree over that half term becomes littered with all of these lovely reward leaves to show the children’s behaviours of how they’ve learned all the themes within the happy centred school. But what you will also notice is the children recognising why those behaviours are important. And what we’ve seen some schools do is at the end of that half term is take those leaves down, give them to the children to take home to their parents, so the parents then can keep those reward leaves and use some of that terminology as well.

Now what’s really lovely, is that the adults and the teachers get involved as well, so when we start to encourage children to give reward leaves and give reward leaves to each other but also to teachers in assembly, then that’s a lovely thing to see.

Some schools that do this well, they create a little reward leaf post box, where they can post these rewards in because they’ve noticed a teacher doing something well, or another child doing something well and that can form part of your assemblies of celebrating success in that particular theme, and we do get teachers at the beginning saying oh, I don’t want a reward leaf, but actually seeing those teachers get that reward leaf is so important because they’re really important too and it’s important to recognise the brilliant stuff that they do and also with the five themes once you’ve got it rolled out in the school and once you’re confident with it you can start to be creative about how you pop it into your school development plan.

So where are the coping skills and what do you do in terms of coping skills for your teachers and for your parents? What do you do in terms of achievement and success or personal development as we call it for adults, for your teacher, does every single teacher have a personal development plan. All of those things can be started to build into your whole school development plan, so this becomes a whole school approach and not just about the children and then once you get really confident you can start running sessions with parents an that’s where we’ve seen some great successes in our brilliant happy-centred schools.