Completing our mental health in schools course as a beginner

The Carnegie School of Education’s Yorkshire School Mental Health Lead course is designed for education professionals looking to improve mental health support in their schools. The course is designed to support learners at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels of skill and experience. 

Read how Ben Norman found the course as a beginner. 

How have you found the course?

It’s been great to speak to like-minded colleagues, to share ideas, to share best practice and some of the things I’ve been doing too. It’s been nice to see those positively received and to know that I’m along the right lines with things I’ve been putting together. It’s a great opportunity to bounce ideas off people and to hear what does and doesn’t work so well, and I’ve got lots of ideas to take back and talk to my team about. The focus on strengths and looking at the positives to do with mental health has given me some great stuff that I can take to do in staff training, especially when we get back in September. 

How did the opportunity to be on the course come about?

In September, we got an email from the DfE to supply some funding to support and identify someone as a mental wellbeing lead. I said I’d like to do it straight away, because I feel that it’s really important in school settings, in terms of pupils, staff and actually parents. It’s looking at that whole school community and looking at what we can do to make it better for everyone and help everyone’s mental health and wellbeing. Mental health is something that I didn’t know much about before this. I’m from a background where it was very much ‘pull yourself together, sort yourself out, man up’ – a bit old school. This has totally changed my thinking behind the topic of mental health and it has upskilled me immensely, and I’ll be able to take a look of that forward in terms of how I deal with pupils and staff. It’s also made me realise that a lot of what we do as a school is all focused on mental health and wellbeing without us really knowing it. It’s just nice to have it down in writing and to do the activities set by the course to see what we do as a school already and what we can do better moving forward. 

What impact has the course had on you and your school?

This year it’s already had a great impact on our pupils. We’ve changed the wording of things of our extra-curricular activities related to wellbeing, we’ve done staff communal walls, put in staff sessions where we do an optional activity every half-term, where we’ll play rounders or badminton. It’s optional because we don’t want forced fun, we want it to come naturally. The pupils have really bought into it and it’s highlighted how important extra-curricular activities are to them, how important it is to have interests and the ways they can do different things outside of schools. Just last week, we created a pack with 60 different wellbeing activities suggested by our students that they can take home and try out during the summer holidays. Those new ideas were generated by this course. 

Would you recommend the beginners’ course to those in a similar position to yourself?

I wasn’t knowledgeable on mental health and wellbeing at all. I was very naïve about it up until this year, and that’s why I wanted to upskill myself. I just feel like I’ve got so much out of it, learnt an incredible amount and now I understand the role mental health and wellbeing plays within the whole school community. If you get the wellbeing and mental health right, everything else follows. Students enjoy coming to school, staff enjoy coming to work, the quality of lessons improves, the quality of education improves and the outcomes for the pupils improves. It supports the whole package of education.