School Dog

Our work to improve mental health and wellbeing at Gusford continues with Mrs Sparrow leading our efforts in this area. We now have an in-house counsellor, social skills groups for selected pupils, our daily ‘Chill & Chat’ lunchtime provision, we have started Lego Therapy groups and we have two staff currently training to become ‘Thrive’ practitioners. We have also recently successfully bid to the Ipswich Opportunity Area (IOA) be part of a SWERL project, working with UCL (University College London) 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 will focus on improving our environment and building relationships.

One action I have been very keen to take as Headteacher is to have our own therapy dog in school. I have shared a proposal for this with all staff, our Chair of Governors and the interim CEO of the Active Learning Trust earlier this year and I have their support and approval.

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/

New for March 2020 - to support our pupils while we are closed Pebbles now has an email account pebbles@gusfordprimary.net. Our pupils are encouraged to email or tweet Pebbles with photos of activities they are doing at home while unable to attend school. We hope this will help them to feel they remain connected to our school family. Pebbles will do her best to respond to all messages.

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