Our work to improve mental health and emotional wellbeing at Gusford continues, we have two licensed Thrive practitioners and two more staff trained as Emotional Literacy Support Assistants (ELSAs).

In 2019/20 we were part of a SWERL project, working with UCL (University College London) and Ipswich Opportunity Area (IOA) to further support the emotional health and resilience of our pupils and staff. SWERL stands for ‘Supporting Wellbeing, Emotional Resilience and Learning’ and at Gusford our project focused on improving our environment and building relationships.

As part of our SWERL project we introduced a school dog. Pebbles the french bulldog has been coming in to school since she was 8 weeks old. In February 2020, at 11 months old, Pebbles successfully passed her assessment to become a therapy dog with the charity Canine Concern.

You can follow the adventures of Pebbles as she settles in to life as our school dog on Twitter https://twitter.com/PebblesGusford and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/pebbles_gusford/ and now Facebook www.facebook.com/PebblesGusford

During the lockdowns, to support our pupils while we were closed Pebbles opened an email account pebbles@gusfordprimary.net. Our pupils were encouraged to email or tweet Pebbles with photos of activities they were doing at home while unable to attend school. We hoped this will help them to feel they remained connected to our school family.

Please see below copies of our information letter to parents, school dog policy & risk assessment and other key documents.