I must be feeling my age to start with the cliché that “when I was a kid…”, but the modern environment for millennials has vastly evolved from a simpler time of the internet in its infancy, mobile phones the size of bricks (which appear to be back in fashion) topped with an antennae and when buying music was a ritual of sourcing enough change to walk into a store and physically buy a CD with all its glory. Notwithstanding the nostalgia, this period of time still came cloaked with issues of self-esteem, concerns over image, bullying in all its forms, and anxiety to achieve well in school threading all ages together.

Every member of a school community matters. The physical, mental and emotional wellbeing of young children and adolescents are of paramount importance, but it is also vital that there is an ongoing focus on the welfare of all the adults making up the school community. So which values are needed for everyone in a school community to flourish and feel they are on a meaningful, fulfilling life journey?

The Premier League has launched Premier League Primary Stars, a national curriculum-linked education programme which uses the appeal of the Premier League and professional football clubs to inspire children to learn, be active and develop important life skills.

If you’re an educator, you will know the difficulties that can come with having a child in your class who is going through, or has just gone through, a divorce. They can be moody, irrational, angry and generally act out.

The BBC School Report recently found that 70% of surveyed 11-to-16-year-olds had experienced negative feelings in the past year, ranging from “feeling upset and unhappy to feeling anxious, frightened or unsafe”. The report also found that 73% of teachers would often or occasionally worry about a particular pupil’s wellbeing in their free time. However, a third of these teachers had not been trained in how to deal with pupils’ mental health issues.

I have spent most of my career encouraging communication and how it is, and always will be, the key to success. To many people this is obvious, though as adults we tend to forget that teenagers prefer to be non-committal and secretive, if not a little uncooperative.

With so much emphasis on academic outcomes and the growing concerns about the mental and physical wellbeing of many students today (as well as some teachers and parents), how can we give young children and adolescents a rich, fully rounded, holistic education that enables them to fulfil their true potential and prepares them well for life as informed, active and dynamic global citizens?

We would like to share with you a brief insight into what children experience when dance is brought into education, with the following based on our own work with pupils in Bath & North East Somerset. Through dance, children are engaged in creative movement within a group setting. The focus of this work is on the wellbeing and development of the whole child, mindful of their cognitive, emotional, physical and social development.

The Be Real Campaign has launched the new Body Confidence Campaign Toolkit for Schools, designed to help educators develop a whole-school approach to body image anxiety. The Toolkit is available to all UK secondary schools to download for free at www.berealcampaign.co.uk/schools.

One of the best things about being a teacher is the ability to make children cry.

Before you get out the flaming torches and pitchforks, I don’t mean that in the way you might assume. That sort of attitude has no place in modern teaching. Rather, the thing that I enjoy is when something you do as a teacher, a lesson, an activity, or an experience, causes your pupils to have an emotional experience.