Abstract
ABSTRACTA growing evidence base indicates that health and educational attainment are synergistic goals. Students’ relationships with teachers and other students in the school environment are consistently predictive of a broad range of health and well-being outcomes. Despite the potential importance of relationships between students and a broad range of actors within a school, research tends to reduce ‘school staff’ to ‘teachers’. Previous research has highlighted incongruence between the power imbalance within a teacher–student relationship and the dynamics required to address health and well-being-related issues. To date, there has been no investigation into how the nature of the relationships between students and support staff may differ from those with teaching staff. This article aims to conceptualise the role of support versus teaching staff in promoting health and well-being to understand how school system functioning may affect relationships between school staff and students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to obtain the perceptions of staff, students and parents within four exploratory case study schools of differing socio-economic status, geographical location and size. In line with the Theory of Health Promoting Schools and Human Functioning, findings demonstrated that the prominence of well-being relies on provision of staffing structures which include a team of support staff to work alongside teaching staff to provide the time and space to deal with issues immediately and build trust and rapport in a one-to-one setting. Further mixed-methods research is required to investigate how staffing structures can facilitate the development of mutually trusting relationships between staff and students.
Highlights
Adolescent health behaviours such as physical activity, diet and substance use (Boreham et al, 2004) as well as outcomes, such as mental health and subjective well-being (Park, 2004), track into adulthood and are patterned by social and economic characteristics throughout the life course
The structure of teams for supporting student well-being, and in particular, the extent to which well-being roles were performed by teaching staff and support staff, varied substantially between case study schools
Within Woodlands School, the Assistant Head was described as acting as a lone figurehead for the strategic management of health and well-being-related activity, with individual well-being roles largely allocated to teaching staff
Summary
Adolescent health behaviours such as physical activity, diet and substance use (Boreham et al, 2004) as well as outcomes, such as mental health and subjective well-being (Park, 2004), track into adulthood and are patterned by social and economic characteristics throughout the life course Littlecott, 2015a; Moore, Littlecott, Turley, Waters, & Murphy, 2015b). Adolescence is a key life-course period during which to intervene to establish healthier trajectories. Schools provide a setting with high potential reach to facilitate delivery of universal adolescent health interventions which aim both to improve population health and to narrow inequalities (Bonell et al, 2013, 2014a; Langford et al, 2014; Moore et al, 2015b)
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