How a Leeds form tutor replaced paper well-being check-ins with one private group

An NHS England survey found that around one in five children aged 8 to 16 had a probable mental health disorder in 2023. Catherine Mercer's weekly paper well-being card was meant to catch that early. It mostly caught the word "fine".

Where she started

Catherine has taught geography for 14 years, the last nine of them at Calverley Park High School, a 1,100-pupil secondary in north Leeds. Alongside her teaching timetable she is form tutor to 10CM — 28 Year 10 pupils, aged 14 and 15 — and pastoral lead for the year group.

Pastoral care at Calverley Park is built around tutor time: fifteen minutes every morning, with a longer pastoral session on Mondays. For three years, the centrepiece of that Monday session was the well-being card — a paper half-sheet on which each pupil rated mood with a red, amber, or green mark, scored sleep and stress out of five, and wrote anything they wanted in a free-text box.

The card was a good idea on paper, in both senses. In practice it had three problems.

• Pupils filled it in at shared tables, where a neighbour could read it. Almost nobody wrote anything honest in the free-text box.
• Catherine transcribed anything of concern into CPOMS, the school's safeguarding system, by hand — roughly two and a half hours of her week.
• The completed cards went into a drawer. A pupil quietly declining across six weeks looked, card by card, exactly like a pupil having one ordinary bad Monday.

The breaking point

The moment Catherine describes as the turning point was not dramatic. It was a Friday in the spring term when she finally laid one pupil's last eight cards out side by side on her desk.

"The amber marks had been creeping up since January. The free-text box said 'fine', 'fine', 'ok', 'fine'. Looked at one at a time, in a drawer, across eight weeks, there was nothing. Looked at side by side, there was a clear line going the wrong way. I had the data the whole time. I just had it in a format that hid the trend."

Nothing serious had been missed in that case — the pupil was already known to the pastoral team for an unrelated reason. But Catherine took it as a warning. A weekly check-in that produces eight identical cards and no trend is not a pastoral tool. It is a compliance exercise that feels like one.

She spent the Easter break looking at options. School safeguarding platforms were built for case management, not weekly check-ins, and adding a second one was not the answer. A free survey tool gave her trend data but no way to reply to a pupil privately, and nothing parents could see. Her school's SENCO, who had used Bitir with a small intervention group, suggested she try it.

The first half-term

Catherine set up a single private, invite-only Bitir group for 10CM. She set herself as manager and invited all 28 pupils by phone number; 26 joined within the first Monday session and the last two by Wednesday.

The first thing she built was a recurring weekly poll — the digital version of the well-being card. It opens automatically every Monday at 8:45am, stays open until Wednesday evening, and asks five short questions: mood, sleep, how manageable the week ahead feels, one thing going well, and one thing the pupil would like her to know. On paper the card had been completed by a little over half the form. The first Bitir poll came back with 25 of 28 responses, and completion settled above 90% for the rest of the term.

The difference, Catherine says, is not novelty. It is that a pupil answers the poll on their own phone, not at a shared table — and that it arrives in the same app where they already check the week's notices and their own pastoral target. There is no separate form to remember.

How she set up the form group

Once the poll was running, Catherine built out the rest of the structure, which she now treats as her template.

1. Group. Private, invite-only. Pupils appear under their first name and last initial; parents are invited as linked members who see only their own child.
2. Weekly poll. The five-question well-being check-in, Monday to Wednesday. Catherine reads the trend, not just the week.
3. Pastoral targets. One individual goal per pupil — an attendance target, a revision habit, or a confidence target — set in the first week and reviewed at half-term.
4. Notices. Tutor-time information — trips, GCSE options evening, revision deadlines — posted as manager posts so it is not lost in a chat.
5. Celebrations. She marks any pupil who hits four straight weeks of full attendance, and asks each one whether they want it shared with the form or kept between them.

That last point matters more than it looks. Catherine read Bitir's guidance on celebrating milestones without it feeling forced early on, and decided no Year 10 pupil would be named to the form without being asked first. About half say yes; the rest she marks privately.

What private posts changed

The feature Catherine credits most is the private member post. In Bitir, a pupil can write a post that only she, as manager, sees. She decides whether it stays private or — with the pupil's agreement — becomes a group post.

This is what the paper free-text box could never do. A box on a card handed in at a shared table has no honest version. A private post does.

Across the autumn term, eleven pupils used a private post to raise something real — a friendship breakdown, exam anxiety, a difficult situation at home, one disclosure that went straight to the designated safeguarding lead. Catherine is careful about the claim: she cannot prove those eleven would have stayed silent on paper. But after three years of paper free-text boxes that said "fine", she has a fairly strong prior.

Results after one term

The attendance figure surprised her most. She did not move the form onto Bitir to lift attendance, and she is wary of claiming the app did it on its own — the school ran a parallel attendance push the same term. But the form group gave that push somewhere to live: parents could see attendance without being phoned, and a four-week streak was something a pupil could be quietly congratulated for.

"The honest version is that Bitir did not fix attendance," Catherine says. "It made attendance visible to the people who could fix it — the pupil and the parent — every single week, instead of once a term in a report. Visible is most of the battle."

What she would tell another tutor

• Move one form first. Do not roll it across a year group until you have run a full half-term yourself.
• Set the weekly poll up before the first session, not after. A check-in added in week three never recovers the habit.
• Be clear with pupils and parents that the app is not the safeguarding system. Concerns still go where they always went.
• Use first-name-and-initial display, not full names. It changes how much a 14-year-old is willing to write.

What's next

Calverley Park is piloting Bitir across the rest of the Year 10 forms from September, with Catherine writing the pastoral playbook. She is also planning a separate group for the parents of pupils sitting GCSEs next summer, so revision deadlines and exam information land in one predictable place rather than in twelve different bookbags.

Related reading: four weekly check-in templates that get 90%+ response rates, and how to celebrate milestones in a group without it feeling forced.