Our Service Aims:

• To improve pupil wellbeing
  To improve staff morale and resilience to reduce stress and risk of burnout in your staff teams
• To provide your staff with greater confidence and resources in managing mental health difficulties and behaviours that challenge in the school environment.

Schools and colleges can be in a unique position to identify potential mental health difficulties and promote positive changes in wellbeing.  Children spend a significant amount of time in the school environment and this can provide a number of opportunities for positive relationships and change through engagement with the pupil, and their caregivers.

We recognise that much of the current training and services offered to schools focuses on building knowledge.  Our input will support you in building the confidence and skills to apply that knowledge.  Our focus is not on developing your staff into therapists, but rather to support them in working pro-actively to provide an emotionally containing environments for pupils whilst awaiting specialist input.

Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision

With the Green Paper consultation Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision published in December 2017 there is an increasing need for all schools and colleges to;

• Identify and train a Designated Senior Lead for Mental Health
• Work with Mental Health Support Teams to support those with mental health problems
• Update their existing mental health and behaviour guidance 
• Build on mental health awareness training

The challenges

The Department for Education have researched the challenges that schools and colleges can face in supporting mental health and emotional needs for their pupils and highlighted the following;

• Lack of local services, with high waiting lists for specialist mental health provision
• Lack of capacity in day to day working for staff to dedicate what they felt to be sufficient time to building a culture of wellbeing and identifying need.
• Lack of a lead member of staff for mental health needs in the school or college
• Lack of knowledge and understanding around mental health

Our experiences have identified that these are areas that many schools and colleges report difficulties in.  Our model promotes the building of knowledge and confidence in mental health support, with a focus on developing ‘Mental Health Champions’ within the staff team.  Often the initial response from staff in relation to being asked to consider mental health difficulties can be a sense of feeling overwhelmed.  With the increasing responsibilities they already undertake on a daily basis, mental health awareness can feel like another task.  Our approach allows staff to build and develop their knowledge of mental health, emotional needs, and how best to support pupils in such a way that it will become a normal way of working, rather than a separate challenge.

Whilst staff are able to do this, without training and support they are anxious about ‘making things worse’.  Our support in schools aims to reduce this anxiety and provide staff with reassurance and additional skills to best support those children who have additional needs.

CPD—making it affordable

With continuing pressure on budgets, allocating funds for CPD has been identified as a concern.  The Teacher Development Trust identified that those schools rated by Ofsted as ‘Unsatisfactory’, spent around 20% less on CPD than those with higher Ofsted judgements.  Preventative approaches for Mental Health needs to be a priority.  In 2004, a report identified that 9.8% of children aged 5 to 16 have a clinically diagnosed mental disorder.  In addition to this, a further 15% of children were identified to have less severe difficulties which put them at risk of developing mental health problems in the future (Green, 2004).

We provide a variety of packages to schools and aim to make these affordable and accessible. 

We provide a free 1 hour consultation to identify a package to suit your needs with a no obligation quote.