TASIS England Deputy Head of Boarding Elaine Luckham on how its Thrive wellbeing mentoring is shaped by student perspectives
Boarding communities offer the perfect opportunity to help students address issues relating to emotional and physical wellbeing early. For the last three years, we have been integrating a wellbeing and mentoring program called Thrive into our boarding provision at TASIS England. Now in its third iteration, with adaptations and improvements made in response to annual student and staff feedback and the findings of an action research report, our initial model has been somewhat turned on its head.
Our ‘why’ for creating Thrive has remained constant from conception. Providing students with the knowledge and tools to manage their own wellbeing and moving them towards a solution-focused mindset has always been our aim. To this end, we originally had a 35-week program of topics ranging from life skills, such as basic cooking lessons, goal setting, and personal budgeting, to social and emotional development (with conversations around topics such as resilience, healthy boundaries, and stress management). We chose mentoring as the means of delivery because it is an evidence-based method for providing guidance and support.
The ‘how’ of what we do is where the evolution of Thrive is visible. Both students and staff involved in the program felt that Year 1 was too content heavy and not necessarily aligning with individual student needs in real time. We had coordinated certain topics – dealing with exam stress, for example – with the school calendar and left spaces for student-led conversations but, clearly, there was room for improvement.
By the end of Year 2, we had further data from student surveys and from our action research report. Both sets of data were telling us the same things. Mentoring programs work best when they are mentee (student) led, when the benefits of mentoring are communicated effectively with mentors and mentees, when mentors have confidence in the efficacy of their skills, and when the mentor-mentee match is made with careful consideration.
These findings informed our Thrive Operational Plan for Year 3. Our mentor-mentee matches were made with more contextual information about each student – including what they wanted to get out of their Thrive experience. Mentors have received more skills training, as well as access to evidence-based resources. We took time to talk with students and staff about the commitments, challenges and benefits of engaging in a mentoring relationship and have offered more ongoing support as those relationships have gone through the initial and established phases. The focus now is on taking time to establish connection and rapport between mentor and mentee. It is from this solid foundation that students gain the confidence to talk about themselves, their goals, dreams, ambitions, and challenges.
We are proud of the steps that we have taken in creating a bespoke wellbeing program for our students. We know we still have much to learn, but it is now embedded into our boarding provision, and the hard work put into getting it established is evidenced in positive feedback we see in our student surveys. While it is unrealistic to expect young people to be happy 100 per cent of the time, if we can make even marginal differences in the wellbeing of the students under our care, then developing Thrive has been incredibly valuable.
TASIS England tasisengland.org
Further reading: DOYRMS on the importance of a co-curricular culture
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