It may have taken a pandemic for it to happen, but wellbeing is now established at the very top of every school’s agenda. Results in the exam hall and on the sports field have lost their shine, as around the world we have grappled with the challenge of Covid and the range of mental health issues that it has brought.

Positively Kellett

To some extent, schools in Hong Kong were ahead of the curve. We had long recognised the challenges that young people face in this examination hothouse with its tiger parents and insatiable appetite for badges and certificates, fuelled by an endemic tutoring culture. There is no wonder that the city has the dubious distinction of being the teenage suicide capital of the world.

For these reasons, Kellett put in place a whole-school wellbeing programme, Positively Kellett, back in 2017. Initially the programme drew on the work of Martin Seligman at Geelong Grammar School, but, over time, the programme has evolved to meet the particular needs thrown up by our context.

Positively Kellett is a whole school community initiative involving students, staff and parents. The project has entailed training staff and running a range of sessions for parents so that we are all on the same page.

We have also been clear from the outset that we wanted to share with our wider community, helping other school communities to learn from our journey. That is why we were particularly delighted to be awarded Beacon Status for Wellbeing by COBIS, recognising our progress and enabling us to share with others how best to imbed wellbeing into your own school context.

Working on the basis that “schools find time and make compulsory the areas which they value most”, each student from Reception to Year 13 has a timetabled lesson each week where we try to explore character strengths and embed a range of tools, such as journaling or meditation, to cope with the challenges that life throws.

A simple example will illustrate the approach. Those of us who work with teenagers know only too well that they have a propensity to catastrophise any situation: they can spiral from a dropped grade or break-up with their boy/girlfriend to their life being ruined in seconds. One strategy that we try to embed within the Positively Kellett programme is to encourage the student to visualise and consider ‘the worst possible scenario’ (they are often already there!); then to visualise ‘the best possible scenario’; and, finally, to consider the ‘most likely possible’ scenario’. This simple self-therapy tool can help students get things into perspective and allow them to move on. It is a tool that is shared with staff and parents so that they can support our students more effectively.

Covid and Wellbeing

Kellett found itself in the vanguard when Covid struck. Not only because of our proximity to Mainland China, but because the protests and the period of civil unrest in Hong Kong throughout 2019 already had given us a taste of home-learning and forced us to put structures in place to teach and support our students remotely.

As with most schools, it has been challenging to run socially-distanced wellbeing initiatives or to shift them online, but the team have been creative. Our ‘Feel Good Fridays’ have become an important focus in the week when times get tough. These wellbeing events at breaks and lunchtimes, such as Open Mic, Beat Saber and other informal House competitions, bring the school community together. We have endeavoured to transfer these events online during periods of extended home learning to promote that all-important sense of connectedness and belonging.

Our current challenge is that the chronic nature of Covid that is taking its toll. Quarantine and travel restrictions have magnified the dislocation of staff and Kellett families from established home support networks of family and friends, and prevent them from attending key life events, such as friends' weddings and even family funerals.

Lessons Learned

Here are five lessons learned from our experience at Kellett:

1. It is essential to have a culture where the wellbeing of the community has a high priority in the strategic and operational decision-making process.

2. An effective wellbeing programme needs resources: staffing, training, space (we have just created a dedicated meditation space) and, most important, that scarcest resource of all, time.

3. Regular monitoring of student and staff wellbeing is important. In practice it doesn’t really matter whether this is done by an app or a Google form but taking the pulse of the community and acting on the feedback has been at the heart of our approach.

4. Wellbeing programmes do not replace the need for robust and extensive pastoral care structures. Over time, we have come to see Positively Kellett as a proactive approach to student wellbeing, whereas our pastoral structures by necessity need to be reactive. The wheels sometimes do fall off for students and staff and it is important that there is a team trained and ready to support them.

5. Wellbeing is not the sole responsibility of the school. It has to be a partnership. School leaders have a particular responsibility to create a school culture that enhances wellbeing and to allocate the (sometimes limited) resources at their disposal in a way that protects and enhances student and staff wellbeing. However, individuals need to do their part, too. Everyone needs to take a level of responsibility for their own physical and mental health, which means taking care of the basics (sleep, diet and exercise) and seeking help when times get tough.

A final thought: don’t forget to put your oxygen mask first

Many leaders talk as if it is unprofessional to disconnect and that they feel guilty if they do so. This is the digital equivalent of "my door is always open”, and it is a recipe for burnout. In practice, in addition to getting enough sleep and exercise, looking after our own wellbeing is about putting on the "out of office", having a regular digital detox and spending some quality time with those whom we love.

Mark S. Steed is the Principal and CEO of Kellett School, the British International School in Hong Kong; and previously ran schools in Devon, Hertfordshire and Dubai. He tweets @independenthead