St Martin’s school is very proud to announce that we have achieved the gold standard. The award encompasses 4 different strands: SEMH (Social Emotional Mental Health), PE, Food in school and PSHE. As a school, we had to reason and evidence that we had excellent qualities in all four sections. We ensured that the curriculum being delivered incorporated quality first teaching and had healthy living as the main priority throughout. We incorporated a range of new initiatives in school for example: sport’s leaders at break and lunchtimes and we redesigned the Design and Technology to make sure high-quality food teaching was taking place. We thought hard as a school on how we could maintain both staff and children’s mental health and have made significant improvements. The marking policy was looked at and changed to become more manageable with a big focus on live marking and feedback has been very positive. For the children, as a whole-school, we have daily check ins which fosters an environment that encourages children to share and talk about their feelings. Feedback throughout school has shown both changes to be very successful.

We attended the award ceremony in Harrogate last year and we were presented the certificate. Here are some pictures below to showcase some of the aspects of the day and some of the fantastic changes we made for the award.

Sports Leaders

To encourage more girls to get involved and take up sport we came up with the idea of Year 6 girls being sports leaders. The girls have designed a time table of different sports for each week. It has been successful as the uptake (from both boys and girls) has been high and the children have enjoyed the different range of sports.

Daily Mile

The daily mile was introduced, as a suggestion from the Healthy School’s team, to encourage children to become more active at lunchtimes. It has been very successful and children from all year groups are involved.