Helping Schools meet the mental health needs of children

Addressing the mental health need

There is a big issue with children’s mental health. There is a growing proportion of children with mental ill health, and notably in teenage girls, where there are big challenges. What we would like is for everybody to learn about mental health like they do with other aspects of health and wellbeing.

They learn about healthy diet, exercise, handwashing before you eat, basic hygiene to maintain a healthy body. A healthy mind and mental health should be part of that, and everyone should leave education with a good understanding of that.

There are obstacles that face schools when it comes to mental health provision. 

Schools are about groups of people being together. So much of the mental health agenda, when people think of mental health, doesn’t come from that perspective. It comes from a medical and clinical angle. So when someone has a problem with their mental health, they go to a clinician or some kind of specialist or doctor, who will diagnose that problem and provide treatment – personalised, individualised – and clearly that’s vital and we need more of that within our society. 

Schools don’t operate like that, they don’t get people with a problem and diagnose and treat them. They work with groups of students and help them fulfil their potential, it’s quite a different mindset and approach. 

And so the biggest gap within schools, and where our agenda fits in, is to help schools to think through what a whole-school based approach to mental health looks like. It’s very different to the clinical approach, of diagnosis and treatment, because that’s not our expertise, it’s not our background. 

We’re working on that social, universal, supportive approach that can add to the clinical approach. If we can get the two models working together better, and more cohesively, we’re both playing an equal and powerful part, while both being quite distinct.

At the moment we’ve got many, many people on our school mental health leadership programmes, because we’ve worked in school leadership for many years. Recently, the Department for Education (DfE) funding has come along and, rightly, people have turned to us because we’ve been doing this for a few years now. We’re really busy right now, and we’re delivering multiple groups of this leadership training.

We’re doing stuff that the sector likes, and we’re leading that agenda, which is just fantastic.

And we’re also doing what we did at the very beginning – talking to school leaders for mental health, and finding out what they want, seeing what their needs are. And we design stuff with them. So, some of the colleagues that work with us are senior mental health leads, who have done the course in the past and are now on our staff. And some of which are still working in schools as well.

Senior Mental Health Lead training

Everyone on our Senior Mental Health Lead training gets several things, but the most important is a good understanding of mental health within the education system and what it could be, and they get the chance to approach it from a leadership angle. When we first started doing courses we were clear that we wanted to be as much about leadership as mental health. There were lots of mental health in education courses out there, but there wasn’t any about leadership and mental health. 

So we wanted to get that real understanding of mental health, particularly through that social and public mental health lens, but also their own leadership development. Feeling more confident, able, self-aware, more able to lead with a strategic perspective of mental health.

It also allows them to get a hold of an agenda like mental health, which is quite complex, to ensure it embeds into school policy, practices and to make sure it is applied consistently across the school for that whole school approach, and all those different areas.

So they not only develop a real understanding of mental health, but they have a real, solid awareness of their own leadership ability, and their ability to influence and create positive change and that self-awareness to do that.

And they also leave the course with a network, the ability to connect with other people, and awareness of the policy agenda. They also have access to the latest research and evidence around mental health in education, because it’s a relatively new area. There are some countries that are about ten years ahead of where we are, and we can learn a lot by looking at international best practice, not that it’s all directly transferable, but we can look at it critically and identify which bits are things that we might want to consider.

And because we work nationally, we can see where other areas have done different things, where they have different approaches to mental health in schools. So we can share that with our colleagues on the courses, and some of them chip in with best practice we don’t know of. We’re creating a national network of mental health leads who are able to keep in touch throughout their professional development beyond the courses as well.

Impact for children and young people

We all need some help and support from time to time. If this is provided early this can prevent some of those problems from escalating. So, children and young people leave with that and a deeper sense of self awareness, knowing how to manage their emotions, when they need to seek help, how they can seek help, and then leaving feeling that they belong to school and the community.

This means that their time at school made them feel valued, and they’re so pleased to have had that experience, but they’re equally excited to leave school because they have a lifetime ahead of them, which can be meaningful and valuable and filled with joy. They’ll also know it’ll be hard, and there’ll be hard times, but they’ll know they have the resilience and support so that they can get through those difficult times when they crop up.

They leave with hope and optimism about themselves and their futures, because sadly at the moment there are too many children leaving school without self-belief and belief in their own abilities for their future, which is so depressing and is linked to mental health issues in later life. 

So they need to have that real strong sense of wellbeing, and schools are a great place to foster that. And many schools already do, and are doing that, but that’s the vision – that everyone leaves with that. 

And not everyone will have great mental health. And also we shouldn’t expect that.

People get ill, people have accidents and break their legs. We try not to do it, we try to put measures in place to keep us safe, but it still happens. With mental health it’s the same, we’re still going to have mental health challenges and illnesses, but we need to accept that this is, to some extent, normal. 

Not that we should accept it as being very high, and if there are causes we can identify and reduce we should put in those mitigations, but we shouldn’t want zero mental ill health. And when people experience grief or trauma, they’re going to feel low or depressed, or feel anxious before driving tests and exams, so that’s part of who we are.

But it’s helping children be self-aware enough to manage their emotions and know when to seek support so that we can live life to the full and experience all the emotions that we will, but it’s done in a safe and supportive way.

About Minds Ahead

Minds Ahead is a social enterprise focussed on improving mental health in the education system. Working in partnership with Carnegie School of Education, they form the Centre of Excellence for Mental Health in Schools, a collaborative initiative about to go into its fifth year.