Cardiff Sixth Form College

Cardiff Sixth Form College, an independent international school in Cardiff, Wales, UK, has revolutionised the way its high-achieving A-Level students approach their mental and physical health. Through the school’s innovative CREATE© Portfolio, students are not only maintaining academic excellence but are also developing the resilience and balance needed to succeed in life. Over nine in 10 pupils feel the College equipped them with valuable skills that they will be able to use throughout Higher Education and beyond, increasing their sense of wellbeing and allowing them to develop in areas that they would not have had the opportunity to have done previously. This bespoke solution has set a new standard in the education industry, positioning Cardiff Sixth Form College as a trailblazer in the field of student wellbeing.

Cardiff Sixth Form College frequently tops school league tables for A-Levels and the school recognised that it would need to be extremely proactive in providing balance, developing resilience, and attaining a consistency of approach to healthy futures. The school’s CREATE© Portfolio was designed to strike this balance. Each of the portfolio’s six key areas represents a letter of the word CREATE – Community, Respect, Engage, Active, Thrive, and Enrich – and each key area has its own theme, such as staying active, resilience, and self-care, that are linked to local and national mental health initiatives and positive psychology models.

Students choose specific areas based on areas of their lives they would like to develop further and are then set tasks, such as volunteering, for which they are awarded points over the course of two years. The aim of awarding points is to encourage engagement. Due to the large multicultural nature of the college, global perspectives on wellbeing and mental health were also embedded into the programme to make it more readily relatable to all learners.

In addition to improving student wellbeing, the programme has led students themselves to reach out to the local community with their own support and wellbeing initiatives, like tutoring disadvantaged pupils and a free advisory service on applying to universities in the UK.

If Cardiff Sixth Form College wins the World's Best School Prize for Supporting Healthy Lives, the school intends to use the prize funds to further develop the CREATE© Portfolio programme, both within the school and with its wider community, while continuing to support their students' mental health and wellbeing to maintain academic excellence.