Pastoral Care

Our Peer Mentor scheme offers sixth formers external training on supporting their Peer Mentee. This scheme, similar to a ‘big sister’ programme, has helped many junior pupils resolve friendship and other issues. 66% of our sixth formers are now trained Peer Mentors.

We train pupils in every year group to be Anti-Bullying Ambassadors; our leadership on this issue has been recognised externally by The Diana Award, who have had us host Anti-Bullying Ambassador training for around 100 other schools, as well as awarding us their prestigious ‘Well-being Badge’.

Resolve is a pastoral programme that helps younger pupils in Classes 3, 2 and 1 (Years 7, 8 and 9) resolve their own friendship issues in a constructive and successful manner. The scheme builds resilience among pupils, as well as cultivating leadership skills, communication skills, cooperation skills, confidence and tolerance. If pupil-led resolution does not work to resolve a friendship issue, or our teachers feel that stronger intervention is needed, then the situation may be referred to the College’s Peer Mentors who will run a mediation session.

We aspire to be as phone free as possible, and recently signed up to the Yondr Programme which uses a secure pouch to store phones. Pupils in C3 - II Juniors have to lock their phone away as they come in the door, they then keep the pouches with them all day, unlocking them as they leave. This encourages our students to be more responsible, whilst empowering them to have phone free spaces in a hyper connected world. Sixth Form students can keep their phones with them throughout the day, but only to be used in the Sixth Form common spaces. 

Alongside this approach, we run a comprehensive programme of e-safety education for both pupils and parents which includes workshops about safe use of social media channels, recommended evening curfews for pupils with their own mobile phones, monitoring of class WhatsApp groups and social media groups dedicated to positive comments only.

Most recently, as part of our Queen’s Off Screens programme, we have held regular ‘digital detox’ initiatives and made each year group swap their smartphones for a Nokia brick ‘dumb phone’ for a whole week. We also issued every pupil with a Queen’s branded alarm clock, so no one has any excuse to take their phones into their bedrooms!

To highlight the importance of mental well-being, each term Queen’s runs a regular ‘Thrive’ themed week. These have included ‘Kindness Week’, where pupils and teacher recorded over 1,000 acts of kindness; and ‘Failure Week’, where teachers publicly shared their biggest failures to counter the culture of perfection facing teenagers.

We had such fantastic feedback on ‘Thrive’ in its first year that we have now made it a formal part of the curriculum for Years 7 and 8. Pupils study lessons in ‘Truth’, ‘Kindness’ and ‘Resilience’, taught by our Principal, Deputy Head (Pastoral) and Thrive Lead teacher.

Feedback from both pupils and parents has been overwhelmingly positive:

Embedding 'Thrive' in our curriculum underlines our commitment to pupil well-being: this is not about one-off initiatives but is absolutely integral to our school ethos.