Positive Education
Our K-12 Pastoral Care programme is informed by evidence-based research in the field of Positive Psychology and is expressed as Positive Education. Positive Education brings together the science of Positive Psychology, pioneered by Dr Martin Seligman, with best practice teaching, supported at Scone Grammar School by ‘Grammar Minds’ (developed with Building Learning Power and Visible Learning) to encourage and support our whole school community to flourish.

Positive Education focuses on specific skills that assist students to strengthen their relationships, build positive emotions, enhance personal resilience, promote mindfulness and encourage a healthy lifestyle. Positive Education starts with having a growth mindset. The keys to Positive Education at Scone Grammar School are: developing a sense of wellbeing for students (and staff) thus allowing us to find meaningfulness in everything we do, building positive emotions, encouraging life qualities to assist achievement at school and in life beyond our 3:10pm bell.

Caring for the Individual
We help each individual student to identify and draw on their individual character strengths, understand and support their individual learning path and inspiration to contribute to their wellbeing and learning.

Character Strengths
God-Given Character strengths are the qualities that come most naturally to you. Every individual possesses all 24 God-Given character strengths in different degrees, giving each person a unique character profile. When you know your strengths, you can improve your life and thrive. Research reveals that people who use their strengths a lot are 18x more likely to be flourishing than those who do not use their strengths.

We apply this in learning and overall school life, stretching and supporting each individual to bring out their best and learn how to use these strengths to move them through challenging times, building resilience and motivation.

Visible Wellbeing Training
When we feel good we function well. Where there’s a Will which is a local charity developed to promote positive education and improve wellbeing. Thanks to their generous support and direction, Scone Grammar School has recently completed Visible Wellbeing Training for each staff member within the school.

Visible Wellbeing is a whole school approach to wellbeing. It makes the very act of teaching itself a factor that builds student wellbeing and is applied across the curriculum so that it is embedded in everything we do.

School Counsellor & Pastoral Care Team
Our Pastoral Care team is here to support the wellbeing of each individual student. Lead by our Deputy Principal - Wellbeing Joseph Lynch, we also have a designated school counsellor, Anna Brayshaw and our three House Patrons Anne Carter, Josh Noble and Jason Croucher who support students to bring a sense of belonging in their designated house.

Primary BounceBack! Programme
BounceBack! is a programme designed to do as its says. It helps kids to Bounceback! when things get a bit tough, to provide learned resilience and motivation to persevere. It is a positive education approach to wellbeing, resilience and social-emotional learning for primary school children, through engaging lessons using children’s literature and relationship-building teaching strategies to explicitly teach social and emotional learning skills and promote student wellbeing and resilience.

Secondary Pastoral Care Wellbeing Programme
Students have dedicated access to their Tutor during a Pastoral Care period each week. Pastoral Care activities during Pastoral Care may vary, but all are intended to achieve one or several of the following objectives:

–    to provide a personal contact between the school and home on routine matters relating to student wellbeing, behaviour and academic progress

–    to encourage and facilitate the emotional, intellectual and moral development of students throughout their school career and beyond

–    to assist the development of team building, peer support academic and leadership skills and

–    to help guide and monitor academic progress through contributions to school reports, liaison with subject teachers and parents. 

Vertical Wellbeing Integration 
Known to our students as ‘PAS’, our Vertical Pastoral Care programme is a class where students from The Yellow Cottage Preschool right through to Year 12, are mixed up across all age groups to provide students with connections across the school, the chance to get to know other students and teachers, but most of all to develop leadership and positive education skills that will support their wellbeing.

Chapel
All of our students from The Yellow Cottage Preschool through to Year 12 attend a weekly chapel service next door to the school, at St Luke’s Anglican Church. This regular service cements our Christian foundation, allowing our students to explore their faith in fun ways. Students often present and talk about various experiences, such as our Vanuatu Mission Visit, that help students to understand the context of Christian values and extending these to a wider community.

Mentoring
Creating a mentoring relationship creates a positive connection, especially helpful for students who benefit from stronger support. Mentoring can be a subtle relationship instigated for wellbeing growth. It also happens organically in the playgrounds, through our Grammar PLUS programme, aligned by a common interest in extra curricular activities such as choir, chess, touch football, art and debating.

Buddy Programme
Whilst our buddy programme is a wonderful way of developing leadership skills, it is also very much about caring, providing connection and a sense of belonging.

We have a buddy programme for preschool students transitioning to Kindergarten, with our Year 5 students moving into Year 6. Students are paired up and this allows our Year 6 students to look out for our Kindergarten students, checking in with them outside the classroom and encouraging them to draw on their strengths, particularly bravery and perseverance.

We do the same for Year 6 students transitioning to Year 7. Each Year 6 student connects with a Year 11 student as they transition to Year 7 and 12 in a buddy mentoring relationship. This involves an offsite camp which transport students out of the day to day school life.

Seasons for Growth
Seasons for Growth is a programme for children, young people or adults who have experienced significant change or loss. Seasons for Growth is based on the belief that change, loss and grief are a normal and valuable part of life.

Class Liaison Parents (CLP’S)
Each class throughout the Primary School has a parent contact. Their role is to support and co-ordinate the other parents of that class year group. This mainly involves updating parents about specific things going on in the school that they need to be across, but it also about bringing them into the parent community within the school to help them feel connected and supported. When families are experiencing personal illness or grief, the Class Liaison Parents rallies support and co-ordinates meals for that family.

Food for Friends
Our Grammar Grind Café team prepares meals to support families experiencing difficult times, be it grieving loss, illness or other challenging circumstances.

Mental Fitness
Mental fitness or health is a state of wellbeing in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. This is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Skills to improve mental fitness can be learnt along with a growing awareness of detecting mental illness. We have a broad range of age appropriate programmes in place, spanning across our whole school from The Yellow Cottage Preschool through to Year 12.

• Teen Mental Health First Aid – This teaches teenagers to detect mental illness in friends or other students and seek help from a responsible adult to support that student.  This initiative is with thanks to Where there’s a Will for providing the course. This year the programme has been introduced for year 8 students following feedback that Year 9 is a very important year to have these skills and awareness in place.
• School Liaison Police – This is a programme we provide to all of our secondary students to educate them about Cyber Bullying, Sexting & Drugs and Alcohol with thanks to the School Liaison Police.
• Black Dog Institute – The Black Dog Institute support a group of our secondary students with a programme to help with depression and anxiety awareness.
• Batyr – This is another mental fitness awareness programme delivered by Batyr for our older secondary students through the generous support of Where there’s a Will.
• Love Bites – This is a programme that educates our mid secondary students about Education Seminar Domestic and Sexual Violence, delivered by NAPCAN (Prevention of Child Abuse & Neglect).

Vanuatu Mission Trip
Each year a group of secondary students spend a week or so visiting schools in Vanuatu to provide connection, support and direction in Christian faith with these communities. These schools have limited resources, but wonderful spirit.

This visit is about caring for others in need and serving a wider community. It is also about stretching our own students out of their comfort zone, learning how to draw on their God-given character strengths and developing leadership skills.