The Wellbeing Toolkit Sustaining, supporting and enabling school staff
19.99
Pros
- The book is structured in an easily accessible way, offering great tips and ideas for all within the school community.
- Applicable to all levels of school.
- A focus on challenging negative cultures and recognising bullying behaviours within the school workforce.
- Offers toolkit takeaways, with easy to manage bullet ideas and checklists to implement.
Ensuring that the wellbeing of everyone within our school communities has (quite rightly) recently risen to the top of the educational agenda, with recognition given that staff members also need supporting to promote healthy lifestyles, so that they too can thrive and strive. Bullying and negative staff cultures can all add to the pressures of teaching a group of students, so the role that schools and leaders have in ensuring a positive working culture is vital.
Where to start? Following his admirable work highlighting the need for a healthy staff culture within schools, Andrew Cowley has devised an admirable Wellbeing Toolkit book, offering a principled and strategic approach to wellbeing. Admirably, the book starts by challenging colleagues as to what wellbeing means to them, as a definition is not simple and will be different for each individual, concluding that each school needs to inclusively reach your own definition as to what wellbeing is, as each school has so many different variables. Therefore, the definition should not be fixed, as life changes, personnel change, and different incidents will happen throughout the school year. The book progresses exploring essential and effective wellbeing values, including such important considerations of celebration, collaboration, respect, trust, support, perseverance and resilience, courage, empathy, time. At the heart, developing a positive school culture is crucial, and Andrew explores challenging toxic barriers to positive wellbeing cultures including cliques and gossip, as well as an acknowledgement that the staff night out is not everyone’s cup of tea. Attention is also given to challenging negative school cultures, and an important section exploring bullying in the school workplace.
The second part of the book explores energising the school environment, career satisfaction, work-life balance, births, marriages and deaths. The book is packed full of wellbeing takeaways, offering practical tips and ideas that make putting a realistic, positive, inclusive and practical policy into place within any school setting manageable. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and any school leader who truly values the wellbeing of everyone within their school community will pick up this book and run with the ideas to positively challenge the negative cultures within the school to make the experience within supportive and manageable for all.
Don’t get me wrong, there are ideas within this book that will challenge various individuals in schools, but negative cultures, bullying and work-life balance need to be called out so that a positive and supportive experience is had by all. A healthy lifestyle is important within and out of the school vicinity and this book is a great starting point to support leaders, teachers and everyone within the school community.
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