About

Hello and welcome to Mr Whild's Wellbeing blog.

My name is James Whild and I am a wellbeing specialist with over ten years experience of working with children. I now works as part of a Sandwell primary school wellbeing department and blog about best practice to make schools, staff, children, parents and entire school families healthy, happy and strong.

After working for a company called Medical Mavericks as a science communicator and teaching children of all ages about health and sports science, I began a PGCE course in 2011 to train to be a primary school teacher. Despite my love for teaching I encountered a large amount of job related stress and eventually was forced to leave the profession just a few weeks before completing the course.

Following this I became keen to improve wellbeing in schools. Whilst working as a supply teacher for an outstanding school in Sandwell, I began learning all I could about my own wellbeing, before introducing the things I had learnt into school life. One of the main areas I focused on was meditation and found that sharing the best resources in this field with both children and staff to have profoundly positive results (something I had found true in my personal life as well). The school would later go on to recieve a nomination for a chartered wellbeing award.

On the back of this success I started my own company, Intervention Meditation, in 2014 and began introducing meditation into schools across the country. The project ended up reaching thousands of children and a large number of teachers.

As a nation we are facing a number of crises in the area of mental health in schools. Record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession and record numbers of children are reported with having problems with their mental health. However, I beleive that all problems we face on a personal level and a wider level are fantastic opportunities to make positive changes. Since facing my own wellbeing crisis a number of years ago I have found that I have been strengthened in ways that have helped me to become a better person who has a more positive influence on the world around me. Let's use this national crisis as the perfect excuse, the perfect opportunity to make schools the happiest places they have ever been, to make teachers and staff the most fulfilled they have ever been and to make children in our schools as healthy, happy and strong as can be.