Let’s keep #wellbeing first in every school

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” (Stephen R Covey)

Every morning, I walk across the moor to the tidal tumble of rocks and sand we are fortunate to call our local seashore and visit the colony of harbour seals for whom this is home. Sometimes they bask, grey bananas, all langour and majesty, on any rocks the tides have spared; sometimes they circle and splash, heads bobbing, buoylike, in the waters themselves. However, this morning, my attention was drawn instead to the body of a baby seal, haunting and haunted by a life not lived, and it made me sad. And then I sauntered back home to begin this article about wellbeing, a writer, as ever, in search of a metaphor.

Not Waving But Drowning

I could have missed this pup, caught in the crack between two large rocks, whilst I looked up and out to the colony itself; I could have returned buoyed by nature at its most beautiful, oblivious to the suffering at my feet. But, instead, I was reminded that, for all the buoyant marketing and messaging in every school’s blinkered collateral and feed, we fail at our peril to look down and notice the children and young people who are not waving but drowning. And this is because, for all our talk of fostering a wellbeing culture, we fail to put, and keep, #wellbeingfirst. As long as wellbeing is an adjunct, it can never be the Main Thing. So what does it mean to put #wellbeingfirst? 

Matthew Savage, LSC Associate Consultant

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