A GROUP which delivers tailored sessions aimed at boosting children’s mental health and wellbeing have visited a local primary school to see the benefits their sessions have been having on pupils.

The team from Life Education Bradford visited Frizinghall Primary School to see how its SCARF programme has been benefitting pupils at the school.

SCARF - which stands for Safety, Caring, Achievement, Resilience, Friendship - was developed by teachers and is focused on supporting primary schools in promoting positive behaviour, mental health, wellbeing, resilience and achievement.

SCARF has been adopted at Frizinghall as a key tool for the personal development and welfare of its pupils, with teachers using its online curriculum resources and planning tools to help all children become healthy and happy life-long learners.

By improving a child’s health and wellbeing, it improves their academic attainment.

Jane Meller, Juliet Vo and team leader Lucy Allott visited the school with Healthy Harold the giraffe, who acts as a mascot for Life Education’s resilience after it was massively affected by the 2015 Boxing Day floods, which destroyed its entre mobile classroom fleet.

The new mobile classrooms allow children to take part in age-specific lessons, meet Harold, have discussions, watch films about healthy eating, the effects of legal and illegal drugs, the body and how it works, friendships, and how their behaviours can affect their dreams and aspirations.

Ofsted praised the SCARF programme in a recent inspection in June at the school.

Tim Palmer, acting deputy headteacher at Frizinghall Primary, said: “Where SCARF was done well the children were happier and more positive about school.

“They understood the rules and responsibilities better. They were more equipped to handle setbacks and disagreements and understood to achieve better they needed to be safe, caring, resilient and friendly.

“We decided to take a cohesive approach to all three practices (SCARF, Investors In Pupils and Restorative Practice) and incorporate them into our SCARF scheme.

“We introduced SCARF to all classrooms, where children decided the rules for their class that would help them to be safe, caring, achieve well, resilient and friendly.

“We decided that we would incorporate the restorative circles into our class assemblies.

“We use a variety of different circle times from the ones in the wonderful PSHE lessons, to restorative sessions and something called ‘Fishbowls’.

“All of this, as mentioned earlier is underpinned by SCARF and the very expertly crafted resources on the Coram Life Education site.

“They have been and will continue to be an invaluable tool for teachers, children and other staff in the school.”

Life Education Bradford is one of the national delivery partners of Coram Life Education, has been delivering tailored sessions to primary aged children for over 28 years.

More than 20,000 teachers across the UK are now subscribers on SCARF. The SCARF Programme provides the tools to meet new safeguarding requirements coming from the DfE, preparation for statutory RSE (relationships and sex education) and Health Education, and getting planning and assessment right.

For more details on SCARF, visit coramlifeeducation.org.uk