The Warwickshire School Health and Wellbeing Service

The Warwickshire School Health and Wellbeing Service is your school nurse-led service – friendly, confidential and free for all school aged children (5-19 years) and their families. We are currently delivering the health needs assessments for reception and year 6 students, which will identify your individual school public health priorities for 2017. Your public health plan will be with you shortly based on data collected from 2015/16. We value your support in this process and would ask to continue to encourage the current reception parents to complete the online assessment.

This year we will also be launching the year 9 health needs assessment which will enable the service to meet the identified needs of young people in secondary schools.

If you need any support for any child in your school please contact us on 03300 245 204 or email WarwickshireSHWBservice@compass-uk.org. Or email one of the area contacts below:

WSHWS_Rugby@welearn365.com
WSHWS_Stratford@welearn365.com
WSHWS_Nuneaton@welearn365.com

Managing Resilience, Stress and Wellbeing

The effective management of resilience, stress and wellbeing is an important factor for schools to consider in their overall management of health and safety in the workplace.

Effective management commitment and support promotes the importance of health and wellbeing and for preventing/reducing the incidence and impact of work-related stress.

 The following guidance information is available to help support schools:

• The WCC Managing Resilience, Stress and Wellbeing Policy and supporting guidance documentation (for schools where WCC is the employer)
• The HSE management standards approach to identifying and managing the causes of work-related stress
• Health and Safety Executive website http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/index.htm
• WCC ‘five ways to wellbeing in Warwickshire’ information http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/5ways

In addition, managing resilience and personal resilience training is available to schools where WCC is the employer.

For further information and guidance, contact the WCC Corporate Health, Safety & Wellbeing Service on 01926 476803 email healthandsafety@warwickshire.gov.uk

Respect Yourself update

The Respect Yourself programme aims to give young people the power to make positive, informed decisions about their relationships and sexual health. Its website (www.respectyourself.info) provides comprehensive, sex positive information for 13–25 year olds.

Other local areas have seen the value of our approach. Both Gloucestershire and Doncaster have licenced versions of our website. We are promoting the website and hope to have it used more widely across the country.

A team of young people volunteer their time to support the programme. They recently developed and help lead a child sexual exploitation youth conference (‘Let’s talk about Sexting’), that was attended by 14 KS3/4 settings. Currently their new resource for parents is being finalised for inclusion on the Respect Yourself website.

We are keen to work with secondary schools. We are able to offer the ‘Doing It’ Relationship and Sex Ed (RSE) programme free to schools. This is funded through public health – it includes staff training and access to a suite of online resources.

Our primary school RSE programme ‘Spring Fever’ has been oversubscribed for this year. Currently nearly 50 schools are signed up. We hope to secure funding to support another 20 schools in the next financial year.

For further information or queries please contact Luke Carter, Project Manager - Respect Yourself: lukecarter@warwickshire.gov.uk; tel: 01926 414984.

Warwickshire Music: Supporting your vision

We all want to ensure that our students enjoy a memorable experience while at school.  We all know that music is a major part of the life of nearly every young person. We also know that with rising stress levels amongst students, music can have invaluable benefits on the wellbeing of our young people.

How students feel about themselves is crucial to their learning and narrowing the gap has to mean continuing to offer a breadth of experience and opportunity.

Warwickshire Music is the lead organisation for the Warwickshire Music Hub. This means that we can support schools in all sorts of ways to realise their vision and give their students a memorable experience.

Substantial Hub funding gives partner schools the opportunity to access a large range of advice and resources including instruments, IT and sound recording/PA equipment. Schools are also able to benefit from exciting and high quality programmes and partnerships that offer a memorable experience to children of all ages.

• Singing for Sounds is a unique language development programme for children in nursery and reception – allaying parents’ fears over speech and language development in young children and phonics testing in key stage 1.
• UpBeat offers whole class instrumental tuition in over 100 schools – highlighting the ethos that ‘every child matters’.

‘Upbeat is too good not to have it in my school curriculum’

Julie Leeman – Head at Welford-on-Avon Primary School

• Playtastic is a unique approach to creating the school band from scratch – encouraging communication and social interaction between children.

‘I didn’t know what a violin was; now I’m playing one!’

Edward – pupil at The Ferncumbe Primary School

•  Singing Playgrounds is a fantastic partnership that gets the entire school singing – helping to reduce anxiety and problems in the playground.
•  World Music and Rock & Pop initiatives provide exciting workshops for all ages – creating “memorable experiences” and interaction between all ages.

‘Thanks very much for letting Alcester play at RockFest!

It was such a great experience for them. You and your team did a great job!’

Renny Badham, Alcester Academy

•   Music Centre and County group activities across Warwickshire – building confidence in children and recognition of their abilities.
•   A dedicated Music Therapy team supports all children in a range of schools – helping with anxiety issues, uncertainty and stress levels.

Warwickshire schools have been supported by Warwickshire Music for over 60 years.   Click on the links below for our recent major events at the University of Warwick Arts Centre for just a glimpse of what we can do to enrich the lives of your students.

Link to Warwick Arts Centre March 2016 video

Link to Warwick Arts Centre May 2016 video

Link to Warwickshire Music for Life Magazine

Opportunity for secondary age students - Warwickshire Police Youth Academy Oct 2016

For secondary age students interested in a career in the police/emergency services

Warwickshire Police is holding a two day event on 15th and 16th October for the young people of Warwickshire, and we are called the Warwickshire Police Youth Academy.

Seasonal Flu Vaccinations - Children at Risk

Your valued support with the seasonal flu vaccination campaign 2016/17 will help ensure that all eligible children are vaccinated.

This year the nasal spray flu vaccine is being made available for children in health risk groups, and as part of a healthy child programme. These programmes are important for protecting children at risk, but also for reducing flu in the community as a whole, and therefore protecting other people at risk.

Occasionally a virus can change (drift) after a vaccine has been produced. This occurs about once in every 10 years. However having a flu vaccine is still the best way of staying protected.

Please support this campaign by talking to parents about the vaccine, displaying campaign posters and downloading resources which can be found here - warwickshire.gov.uk/flu

Children at Risk

On the advice of the Chief Medical Officer, seasonal flu vaccine is made available to all adults and children with long-term conditions aged between 6 months and 65 years of age. The flu virus can cause serious ill-health in children with long term conditions including:

• Chronic neurological conditions
• Chronic liver problems
• Chronic kidney problems
• A low immune system, due to disease or treatment, or problems with the spleen/no spleen
• Diabetes mellitus
• Chronic respiratory conditions, such as asthma or cystic fibrosis
• Chronic heart disease

We ask you to encourage parents whose children fall into any of the categories outlined above, to be vaccinated. Vaccinations will be available through GPs (or through schools for children in Years 1, 2 and 3). The vaccination for children is a simple nasal spray.

For example, studies have shown that approximately 1.1 million children in the UK suffer with asthma. The child with mild to moderate persistent asthma misses an average of 10 school days per year and the child with severe asthma misses an average of 30 days per year.

It is likely that there is a similar, if not greater, loss of school days due to the other long term conditions. Flu is common and a healthy person will recover in a short time. However, flu carries a higher risk of serious bacterial complications and children and young people with long-term conditions are very vulnerable to the secondary complications of flu. We also know that the lowest uptake of seasonal flu vaccines is in children at-risk in the 2-16 year age group.

Healthy Child Programme

You will also be aware that the nasal spray vaccination is being offered to all 2, 3 and 4 year olds (through their GP), as well as all children in Years 1, 2 and 3 at school (through the school). Over the course of a number of years the government is proposing that all 2 – 16 year olds will be offered a seasonal flu vaccination, to protect themselves, but also to protect those closest to them, who may be more vulnerable to the effects of flu. This is a very important programme, as pilots have shown a reduction in the circulation of flu (and impact on the health system) in areas where primary school age children have been vaccinated.

If you have any queries about the vaccination programme, please contact: nadiainglis@warwickshire.gov.uk

For more information, please see www.warwickshire.gov.uk/flu or www.coventry.gov.uk/flujab

Resources (including presentations for screens and posters) are available to download and print from these websites.

Oral health survey of 5 year olds

Please look out for the oral health survey of 5 year olds coming soon

Oral health surveys involving children are carried out on a regular basis in order to provide information about oral health need. This helps to inform decisions about the provision of dental services and action needed to improve oral health. Recent results have shown a continued increase in the proportion of children with no obvious dental decay but there are still marked inequalities at regional and local authority level.

Over the next few months, dental epidemiology teams will be contacting a number of randomly sampled primary schools across Warwickshire to ask them to participate in the survey.  We would greatly appreciate your support and cooperation in order to ensure a successful survey.

Toothache can cause pain, infection, difficulties with eating, sleeping and socialising and impacts on school readiness and school absence. Extraction of teeth under general anaesthetic remains one of the most common reasons for children to be admitted to hospital, despite tooth decay being a preventable disease. These national surveys provide valuable information to help inform local decisions about tackling oral health issues and we would be very grateful for your support.

It is also worthwhile noting that school attainment and health are closely linked. Children’s health and wellbeing is an important area of Ofsted inspections and working with health providers, including through measuring and screening, can be an important way of demonstrating a focus on pupil health and wellbeing.

For further information about the results of the last oral health survey, please see:

National Dental Epidemiology Programme for England: oral health survey of 5 year old children 2015. A report on the prevalence and severity of dental decay.  

For further information about the survey itself, please contact the:

Special Care Dental Service on (01926) 317778.

Roast Dinner Day: an invitation to Warwickshire schools

The national Roast Dinner Day is coming around again on 2 November and it’s a great opportunity to promote the quality of healthy meals your school provides to children at a time when schools across the country will be doing likewise. The event draws national media attention to the work of schools and the hard efforts of their cooks and midday supervisors.  

Last year, Warwickshire schools participated in very successful Roast Dinner Days to celebrate the quality of school meals and healthy eating. Brownsover and Newton Regis School in particular got major national media coverage on the day.   

Roast Dinner Day in Warwickshire is supported by the Food for Life team commissioned by the Warwickshire County Council Public Health Department.

If you would like to enrol you can either:

1. a)    Send an email saying you want to take part in Roast Dinner to ffl@foodforlife.org.uk
2. b)    Register online by visiting the Food for Life page.

Food for Life’s co-founder Jeanette Orey OBE, the school cook who teamed up with Jamie Oliver in challenging the poor standards of school meals, visited Brownsover and was impressed with their efforts as a silver awarded school now aiming to become the first Food for Life gold award school in the county.

Great prizes to be won

This year’s Roast Dinner Day competition focuses on ‘food miles’ and is all about raising awareness of how many miles the food in your roast dinner has travelled before it reaches the dinner plate. Why not run an assembly on the subject of food miles a or take part in the competition and you could win an aluminium vegetable trug or a set of professional Pro Cook gourmet knives for your school cooks.

You can involve as many children as you like whether in your school nutrition action group or a class. How about a little project investigation into where the ingredients for  your roast dinner came from? The prize is for the best blog on your school’s portal on the Food for Life website which shows how you worked with the school cooks and others in finding out where the food for Roast Dinner Day is coming from. This is regardless of the number of food miles a meal has travelled from the farm to the plate. Try to include graphs, photos, maps to make your blog as interesting and informative as possible including how you found out the answers or best guesstimates.

Your local contacts

If you are interested in participating in ‘Roast Dinner Day’ and would like to see how we could help, please get in touch with:

Bret Willers Warwickshire Food for Life programme manager

bwillers@soilassociation.org

07786 994442

Valerie Meehan Warwickshire Food for Life programme officer

vmeehan@soilassociation.org

07736 888462

The Crunch – free teaching resources for primary and secondary schools

Have you received your box of free equipment from the Wellcome Trust for a science initiative focusing on food called ‘The Crunch’? The Crunch is a national programme that will be delivered through schools, science centres and other networks in association with organisations like Food for Life and the BBC around the UK who will run events in their local areas.

Activities will include:

• Every primary, secondary school and college in the UK will receive a free resource kit containing lesson notes, science equipment and short plays from Easter 2016
• Key science centres across the UK will be facilitating interactive food and drink experiences for families, aiming to reach over 100,000 people. This will be accompanied by a new digital game 'Hungry City'
• 'Chew it over', free interactive workshops for adults combining theatre and in-depth discussion, will tour the country performing and creating provocative new drama based on the opinions and contribution of the audience
• Working with BBC micro:bit The Crunch will ask year seven students to share their behaviours and opinions on food, health and the planet using a pocket-sized codeable computer.

More details can be found at the Wellcome Trust website.

As part of Food for Life’s contribution to the initiative in Warwickshire, Bret Willers, the programme manager for Warwickshire is offering schools enrolled with Food for Life:

• Support and advice to teachers on using the kit and associated activities to promote a greater understanding of food and how it is produced;
• Illustrated presentations and discussions about ethical, environmental and health issues associated with food.

For further details contact Bret Willers at bwillers@soilassociation.org or 07786994442.

An important initiative funded by the Warwickshire Public Health Department to promote the health and wellbeing of children in schools across the county and to provide an important contribution to raising educational attainment.

CAMHS Procurement