How to Look After Children’s Wellbeing using Studybugs

Ensuring children’s wellbeing is one of the things we’re most passionate about at Studybugs. So I want to take this opportunity to guide schools through how you can use Studybugs to protect children’s mental health and keep them happy, healthy and in school.

Set Up Wellbeing Alerts to Spot Issues Early

One straightforward way to keep an eye on children’s wellbeing is to set up wellbeing alerts. Wellbeing alerts work by recognising certain words in absence reports and automatically alerting staff of your choice when they’re mentioned. So when a parent reports a wellbeing concern such as crying, anxiety or fatigue, the relevant staff can immediately follow up.

Spot Patterns of Attendance That Could Indicate an Issue

Many wellbeing issues, such as fatigue, bullying or Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA), can have a negative effect on pupil attendance. At Studybugs, we emphasise early intervention to quickly address the underlying reasons for absence.

Identifying and addressing a wellbeing issue quickly means you can limit the amount of time a child misses school, and of course limit how long they struggle with a wellbeing issue without support.

Spotting troubling patterns of absence could be something like frequent absences after weekends or breaks, year-to-date attendance falling below 95% or regular lateness. Studybugs attendance alerts can help you keep track of those triggers and more, so you can investigate absences further and address the underlying issues.

Engage Parents in their Child’s School Life

Communicating well with parents keeps them engaged. This has huge benefits for pupils, from encouraging good attendance to ensuring homework gets done.

An engaged parent might also notice when their child is behaving differently, or if they seem under a lot of stress. Building strong relationships with parents and having an easy means of communicating with them means they’re more likely to feel comfortable speaking to you if they have any concerns.

For schools using Studybugs, parents will likely be used to getting in touch with the school using Studybugs to report absence. Your school may also use Studybugs to send out messages. Having the option to communicate in a way they're familiar with makes it really easy for parents to drop the school a message if they’re worried about their child’s wellbeing.

Get in Touch to Put Things in Place

If you’d like to discuss adding any wellbeing alerts, attendance alerts or talk about anything else mentioned in this blog, .

— Lucas Abbott