2021 will see the roll out of The Wellbeing Project at Rangiora High School. This project initially has a staff focus in terms of understanding the idea of wellbeing both professionally and personally- including what it is and what it isn’t.

The baseline data being utilised is from the 2020 Teacher Workplace survey, the 2019 Wellbeing survey, 2020 Rongohia Te Hau survey and the 2020 Me and My School survey. This means that a range of staff, student and whānau voice is being used to both inform and measure.

The Design Thinking framework, (used in school in other areas), will provide a vehicle to ensure a robust and impartial look at the data, and resulting outcomes or decisions.

Over the next two weeks a selection of staff will be interviewed to “deep dive” some of the data that has come out of the Teacher Workplace survey. These will inform a set of User Stories, that will in turn be tested by a whole staff survey. These User Stories will inform next steps.

Five staff attended the 2020 Wellbeing Conference, which featured speakers who are experts in a range of settings, with a range of experiences. A number of research articles and publications (such as An Educators Guide to Whole School Wellbeing written by Lucy Hone, articles from The Education Hub, and findings from the Education Review Office) are also being incorporated into the thinking and planning.

Above all, the Wellbeing Project is focussed on providing each teacher the skills and tools needed to understand their own contributions to their personal wellbeing, and some strategies or understandings to either manage or improve this. The whole concept ties nicely into the Dispositions that lie at the core of Wānanga, and aspects that already exist in the PE/Health curriculum.