Becoming a Healthy School - Achieving Healthy Schools Status

Healthy School Status is about a school striving to be healthy – it does not suggest that a school has achieved its goal. What is critical is that the school can be seen to be making efforts through its policies and practices to be healthy.

There are currently two methods through which a school can be validated to achieve Healthy Schools Status.

Validating online – The Healthy Schools Process

Schools apply for Healthy Schools Status through the National Healthy Schools website, through this, a schools progress is registered on the national database which local Healthy Schools Co-ordinators access to provide support.

Steps to becoming a Healthy School

  • Register on the National Healthy Schools Website. See below 'Instructions for Logging On To The National Healthy Schools Website' for full details
  • Contact the Healthy Schools Team who will assign you a named Healthy Schools Consultant
  • Speak to other people in school about Healthy Schools and establish a working party
  • Look through the Healthy Schools audit and highlight gaps/areas to prioritise
  • Develop a series of actions to get you started, this might be reviewing a policy or carrying out some consultation with parents/carers
  • Work through and complete the audit (you can dip in and out of your online audit and save the changes as you go along)
  • Once the audit is completed, the website will ask you to develop a series of outcomes to help demonstrate what difference Healthy Schools is making to your school, these might be outcomes taken from your SEF (your consultant can help you with this and provide you with some example outcomes)
  • At this stage we recommend that you arrange to meet with your Healthy Schools Consultant for a pre-validation meeting, this is to check that you are ready to submit for validation and to answer any final questions
  • You are now ready to submit your audit online, you will receive notification from the Healthy Schools team once this has been received
  • Once your school has been validated the Healthy Schools team will offer to come to school to present your Healthy schools plaque and certificate, this could be during an assembly or open evening

Your Healthy Schools Consultant will:

  • visit you in school and support you to complete the Healthy Schools audit (this could include pulling in other professionals to support your school around the different theme areas)
  • attend a Healthy Schools working party meeting and/or full staff meeting at your request to discuss how becoming a Healthy School will benefit your children and young people, staff and whole school community
  • offer to speak to your school governors to highlight what their role is in achieving Healthy Schools Status

For guidance on registering your school on the website click here

Instructions for Logging On To The National Healthy Schools Website

Please click the link below to view the full instructions:

Healthy Schools Website Instructions (140Kb)

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