Silver SHAW award for Burnfoot School
Tuesday, October 17 2006
Burnfoot Community School in Hawick is the first primary school in the Borders to be awarded a silver award in Scotland’s Health at Work (SHAW).
Burnfoot joins Berwickshire High School which received its silver SHAW award last month.
These two schools now lead the way in promoting health among staff in Borders schools by providing many health programmes and events for teaching and support staff.
Speaking about the various steps the school has taken to encourage staff to keep healthy, principal teacher at Burnfoot Community School, Hilary Fowler, said, “As a health promoting school, we are constantly promoting ways for maintaining a healthy lifestyle on a daily basis, not only with the pupils but across the whole workforce. The Healthy Working Group in the school meet on a regular basis to assess the programmes and raise new ideas about how to get staff involved with various activities to keep healthy. All the staff are really enthusiastic and enjoy the many activities which we organise. It has been a very successful few years.”
After securing its bronze SHAW standard last year, Burnfoot introduced various new activities to earn the silver award. These include arranging very successful walking groups, Tai Chi classes and belly-dancing classes, netball, ‘Jamming-Fitness’ and Reiki sessions. Staff are regularly provided with health checks and information on topics such as exercise, nutrition, stress management as well as drug, alcohol and smoking awareness.
Councillor Andrew Farquhar, SBC Joint Executive Education spokesman, is delighted with the progress in schools: “Promoting health in the workplace is an excellent way to keep staff motivated as well as keeping healthy and fit,” he said. “Our teachers and staff in schools are great role models for young people and, by becoming involved in healthy living through the SHAW programme, they provide daily inspiration for youngsters within the school as well as in the wider community.”
Headteacher of Burnfoot Community School, Janice Chapman is now looking forward to working towards achieving gold, “Our next plans are to work on involving the community with our health at work programmes. Already there are many great things happening within the school which involves the community but I think we can take this further. We are very pleased with this award but we will certainly be working hard over the next few months to achieve gold.”
The school will be presented with its Silver SHAW award in late November.
SHAW is a National Award Programme for promoting health in the workplace. SHAW works alongside staff providing information and support. As more managers recognise its benefits to staff, SHAW has become one of the most sought-after workplace awards in Scotland.
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