Supporting service children’s wellbeing 

Mrs Theresa Wadsley is the Student Support Officer at Branston Community Academy in Lincolnshire. The secondary school has more than 100 service children on roll – approximately 10% of the student body. Mrs Wadsley tells us how the school has been supporting service children’s wellbeing.

“I’m the Service Champion at Branston Academy, a secondary school in Lincolnshire. I lead the day-to-day support for the school’s Pupil Premium and Service Pupil Premium students.

“Until recently our additional support for service children was mainly focused on academic attainment and we offered students additional mentoring and tutoring. However, we were finding that the majority of service pupils didn’t need academic help and were struggling more with their mental health and wellbeing.

“Undoubtedly the current socio-political situation has led to more service students being anxious about the future. Many of them watch the news and worry about what it might mean for their serving parents. Additionally we do still have lots of students who have parents deployed or on exercise, as well as lots of highly mobile families being posted in and out of the area.

“In response to this we started a weekly drop-in club for all service students across all year groups to support their wellbeing. It’s an informal club where students dictate what we do each week. Sometimes we play games, sometimes we use resources from Little Troopers at School and sometimes the students just chat together about their shared experiences. Three members of staff run the group so there is always 1:2:1 support available. We’ve been running the club since September and it’s proving popular, with four or five students attending each week.

“Currently the students are working on a full school assembly about what it means to grow up in the forces community and what it’s like being a forces student at our school. The assembly will help educate other students and teachers about the challenges service children often face at home. We think it’s important that the whole school has a good understanding of how different life can be growing up in the Armed Forces.

“Staff with links to the forces are also helping to build our services community. These staff have accompanied our students on military-themed school trips and helped run the services drop-in, services breakfast and services steering group. Our staff are able to share their experiences, make use of their military contacts and knowledge of any external opportunities available to our students.

“It’s still early days, but feedback from both parents and students has been excellent so far. It’s reassuring for parents to know that the school recognises the challenges their children sometimes face at home and that we have dedicated wellbeing support in place. We are very much letting the students take the lead and we are looking forward to seeing what they choose to do next. We’ve just found out about the Little Troopers SQUAD podcast so I’m sure the students will be tuning into that soon.”