Health Promoting Flag Presentation

Our School has become the latest school in the country to be presented with the Healthy Ireland - Health Promoting Schools' Flag!
The Health Promoting Schools’ (HPS) Flag’ is presented by the HSE to schools as an acknowledgement of their work in improving the health of their school communities. The Health Promoting Schools programme supports schools to focus on Health and Wellbeing and involves all members of the school community. Students, staff, parents and guardians are consulted to identify priority health areas and develop an action plan to address these areas. Our Health Promoting Schools coordinator (Mr Kilgannon) and team lead out on the progression of Health and Wellbeing, and this work is supported by the school principal, Board of Management and wider school community.
In St James’ N.S., we took a holistic approach to the Health of our school. We focused on simple areas like; good manners, friendship, anti bullying and gratitude. We implemented a new yard programme which offers children the opportunity to pick from; hurling, soccer, Gaelic football, athletics, gymnastics, skipping and hula-hooping, juggling and circus tricks and four square. Each of these activities have their own stations which are supervised by the Junior Coaches from 5th and 6th classes. We also put renewed focus on promoting healthy eating among our students. We believe Health and Wellbeing is the most important part of childhood and strive to make it the most important part of school life. We are delighted to receive the Health Promoting Schools’ (HPS) Flag but understand that this is not the end of the process of promoting health and wellbeing. "Health and wellbeing is what we do every day and St James’ National School, Bushypark is committed to seeking continuous improvement for the school and its pupils in this area".
​Well done to all involved - it is a great achievement and we are very proud of all the work that has been done!