Best Practice – Staff Wellbeing

Staff Well-Being and Development in Punggol Primary School (PPS) is guided by our philosophy: “Every Individual Matters” and the Ethos of the Teaching Profession. The Ethos shapes the beliefs and practices of our staff.

PPS leverages the culture of care and collaboration amongst staff through the consortium structure and other collaborative platforms such as Timetabled Time (TTT), Pedagogy and Practice (P&P) and Professional Learning Teams (PLT), to raise the capacity of its staff.

In PPS, staff believe that they exist because of the students. Hence, the school helps every teacher to be a Caring Educator. It supports staff’s professional growth and development, recognise their effort and take care of their well-being to bring about work-life harmony so that they can care for the students.

In line with our school mission: Igniting the Joy of Learning, Inspiring all to Care and Share, PPS has put in place structures and processes to encourage staff co-create knowledge by tapping on the expertise of knowledgeable others in the school to share with its members. This is also a process to induct new members into the school and develop them professionally. The structure of a Professional Learning Community ensures teachers focus on improving and impacting teaching and learning through innovation. As a testimony of the school’s strong culture of collaboration, staff openly shares with one another good pedagogies, practices, knowledge and experience during TTT, P&P sessions and PPS Innovation Day. By doing so, the school has put in place processes that make tacit knowledge explicit and ensures the school’s good practices are shared and employed by staff.

A key approach to further enhance staff’s subject mastery is through subject specialisation. Single subject specialisation was prototyped with P5 and P6 teachers in 2010, with due considerations given to staff’s strengths, skills/training, dispositions and preference as well as students’ needs. Based on review, the school now deploys P3 and P4 teachers in 2-subject specialisation with the aim of balancing subject mastery with the need to build good teacher-student relationship in the middle primary.

To enhance organisational capacity, in line with the school Strategic Thrust 3 – School Partnerships, PPS has purposeful partnered MOE HQ divisions such as CPDD, ETD and Gifted Education Branch. Our teachers have partnered CPDD to pilot and prototype initiatives such as STELLAR and PERI Holistic Assessment (HA) and with ETD for Good Practice-Adaptive Practice initiative. It has also partnered its twin school in Nanjing China to build the capacity of its teachers through an exchange programme for staff.

PPS believes that when staff’s needs are met and are happy, they will be willing to do great work for the students. To look into our staff well-being, PPS adopts a Staff Health and Satisfaction Framework that aligns staff well-being processes with factors that have direct impact on staff satisfaction at the work place. These factors are in the outer circle of the framework shown below:

In PPS, we make a conscious effort to build a better workforce and promote a caring culture. We make every staff member feel valued by looking into their Physical, Intellectual, Emotional and Social (PIES) needs.

To ensure that PPS is a great place to work in, we build a safe, healthy and happy working environment by fostering good relationships among staff. Some examples of activities to raise staff engagement include seating staff within the consortium in the staff room, setting aside time for staff to huddle together for team bonding, providing them with Work-Life Champions to share their joys and woes, and using individual staff’s ‘languages of appreciation’ to recognise and motivate them. These are part of the school’s Total Recognition Structure which essentially recognises staff’s performance and commitment to the school goals and directions.