At Portway Infant School, we recognise the importance of supporting every child’s mental health and wellbeing.

Our aim is to ensure that all children feel safe, valued, and happy at school so they can achieve their full potential, flourish as confident learners, and grow into kind and responsible global citizens.

We promote positive mental health and wellbeing through a range of approaches, including our PSHE curriculum and our behaviour policy, which is founded on positive relationships and placing pupil wellbeing at the heart of everything we do.

As a staff team, we continually reflect on and review the impact of our work to ensure we are meeting the emotional and wellbeing needs of our children. We are committed to ongoing professional development, engaging with current research and best practice in this area.

Our Playground Leaders and School Council play an active role in promoting kindness, inclusion, and a culture of speaking up when something doesn’t feel right.

We are proud to work in partnership with COMPASS – Changing Lives, an organisation that provides essential emotional wellbeing and mental health support to children, young people, and families across Derby and Derbyshire. Through this partnership, Compass delivers group workshops exploring emotions such as anxiety, anger, and friendship; leads whole-school assemblies; and provides staff training and professional development opportunities.

At Portway Infants, we are dedicated to creating a nurturing, supportive, and inclusive environment where every child’s mental health and wellbeing can thrive.

Zones of regulation 

At Portway we teach the children about the zones of regulation. We model how we are feeling represented by the colours: red, blue, green and yellow. Please see the picture below which gives examples of what each colour mean. 

Green zone: happy, focused, calm and proud 

Yellow zone: silly, frustrated, excited, worried

Blue zone: sick, sad, tired, bored 

Red zone: terrified, overjoyed/elated, angry, panicked

The children check themselves in each day so they can be mindful of how they are feeling. Their teacher and teaching assistant will support them to understand how they are feeling. The children's emotions will change throughout the day and we model this by moving them to a different coloured pot/basket etc. It is important that we reinforce that it is OK to be any of these emotions. We aren't aiming to move anyone out of a certain colour as we want to teach the children that all feelings are valid and we are practising recognising and acknowledging how we feel. 

Emotionally Healthy Schools 

The Emotionally Healthy Schools website is a great website with lots of information and resources to support children with their emotional health. There is a section of the website to help parents support their child's mental health and well-being.