Pastoral programme
The pastoral curriculum at St Paul’s encompasses a programme of tutorials, assemblies, visiting speakers and PSHE lessons. Developing students’ resilience lies at the core of our wellbeing provision. All students are taught about mental health and self-care, encouraging them to engage in conversations about these important topics.
Specialist programmes enhance our pastoral provision; we work with the Brainwaves Project and Oxford University, which is the largest study of adolescent mental health in the UK for our students in the Senior School, (Y12 and Y13) continuing into their university careers. Students in the V (Y10) follow a five-week cycle of lessons and discussions on positive mental health and wellbeing. Within the school curriculum, students in the Senior School focus particularly on preparing for university, with topics including moving away from home, careers and higher education advice, and student finance.
In recent years we have revised our PSHE programme to ensure that our students are building empathy, understanding their own bias and privileges and exploring their roles as global citizens. PSHE lessons offer a space to discuss issues such as racism, discrimination and human rights across the world. In 2022, we introduced an extra weekly PSHE time with tutors to allow students to reflect on the previous day’s PSHE session. In addition, a varied range of visiting experts enables students to engage with a spectrum of issues and debates.
Our pastoral provision is forward-looking and innovative. We are keen to engage in national debates on pastoral care and mental health and, to involve parents in contemporary pastoral issues, we use the Wellbeing Hub to disseminate webinars and factual information in an interactive fashion. We have also participated in a study run by King’s College London on mobile phone usage, culminating in our policy. Currently, we are working alongside the pastoral team at St Paul’s School in sharing pastoral training for all staff and in exchanging expertise and good practice and devising events and fund-raising activities to support bursary students across both schools.
