At St Birinus School, the wellbeing of our students is our top priority. 

It is the role of the pastoral team within the school to support the boys with a variety of issues, problems, or concerns they may have. These may relate to mental and physical health, bullying, relationship issues, or bereavement. What is most important for me, as the school's Designated Safeguarding Lead, is that our pupils feel that they can reach out and ask for help, should something be troubling them. We really do care about our students and everyone has the right to be healthy and happy.

With the arrival of yet another Lockdown, the team became preoccupied with ensuring that no student concerns were missed and that every SBS pupil felt they could access support if needed. Heads of Year and Form Tutors have been emailing and calling students throughout Term 3 and subject teachers frequently share feedback on how their classes are doing. However, we wanted to come up with a way for students and parents to reach out for support that was easy to access and did not involve approaching a school-based adult directly.

And so SOS@SBS was created ... 

SOS@SBS is an email address that parents and students can access at any time if something is causing worry or concern. We wanted to ensure that the process was quick and had prominence and visibility within our school community. Therefore, last term we launched a competition to design a logo which would be turned into a graphic and placed on our website, with a hyperlink to the SOS@SBS inbox. Our school community can then simply "push the button for help" by clicking on the logo and an email draft will appear ready to be sent.

The winner of our design competition was Bradley Fredricks in Year 8. Congratulations Bradley!

I am delighted to announce that his wonderful drawing has now been turned into a graphic design by our very own and very talented Mr Hudson and Miss Gooch. Thank you both!

Bradley's winning design	Digital version of Bradley's design

I am delighted to announce that SOS@SBS is now fully up and running on the school website.

I would encourage all members of our school community to "push the button for help" if you have any concerns for themselves or other in these challenging and uncertain times.