We are pretty good at looking after physical health in schools. Physical education is compulsory and every child has the lesson regardless of their current physical condition (within reason, of course). But what about mental health? Too often, it is only those in urgent need of care who get the benefit of intervention. General upkeep of mental health just doesn’t get the same curriculum focus.

This was certainly the case four years ago when I was appointed deputy headteacher with responsibility for pastoral care. I soon realised that we had little in place to support the positive mental health of children in our school. What we did have was a private education psychologist, who intervened when a child was in a crisis. However, this wasn’t a long-term solution and certainly wasn’t proactive.

So, what were my options? Searching for an evidence-based approach that we could adopt was a minefield, as there were so many companies selling different packages, all claiming to improve mental health. Some of these interventions had a small evidence base and some had no evidence base at all. Many companies also seemed to confuse the term mental health with mental illness - this did not instil confidence.

So, to begin, we piloted some well-known evidence-based interventions to test their effectiveness within our school. One of these was mindfulness, and it is a good example of how difficult it can be to find effective mental health interventions. We found measuring the impact very challenging. Also, some children loved mindfulness and would certainly go home and use it, while others really didn’t enjoy it and told us they wouldn’t ever attempt it at home. If we weren’t getting everyone involved, then we believed it wasn’t the right approach for us.

It was disappointing. But then I read about an American evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning called RULER. This was created by educators, researchers, and psychologists at Yale University, led by Dr Marc Brackett, a Yale professor and the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

At the time - this was in 2016 - RULER had been around for about 10 years and had extensive longitudinal studies demonstrating its impact in thousands of schools across the US. The studies offered strong evidence that RULER improves emotional intelligence in pupils, reduces anxiety, reduces the likelihood of children developing mental health or conduct problems, improves attainment and reduces burnout and stress for staff. RULER is now used in many primary, secondary and further education establishments, and even in businesses, in the US. RULER stands for the five skills of emotional intelligence: recognising, understanding, labelling, expressing and regulating emotion. The approach is underpinned by the rigorous and explicit teaching of emotional vocabulary. Children are taught to unpack how they are feeling and to use a bank of strategies to regulate their emotions in the short term, alongside longer-term strategies to support wellbeing.

I could immediately see how it was perfect for us. It was not just well-evidenced - it did not expect one tool or theory to support every child; instead it offered a range of tools. The four main ones are:

1. The Charter

Children create a whole-class or school agreement for how they wish to feel each day. For example, the children may want to feel heard, respected, happy and safe. They can then agree ways in which they can all help to make this a reality. So, it might be that the children agree that to feel respected, they will apologise to each other when mistakes are made or feelings are hurt and try their best to forgive when they receive apologies. The aim is to create a climate of respect and accountability for each other’s feelings.

2. The Mood Meter

The Mood Meter is a graph based on the two dimensions of feelings: pleasantness and energy. The x axis represents pleasantness (how pleasant am I feeling from -5 to +5?), and the y axis represents energy levels (how energetic do I feel from -5 to +5?). Children are taught to plot their emotions on the Mood Meter, in the knowledge that there is no such thing as a bad emotion - all emotions can serve us.

The teacher then spends time introducing feeling words one by one to pupils and leading sessions in which pupils discuss strategies for managing each emotion.

Research (for example, Ford et al, 2018) shows that children have very few words to describe their emotions and rely on obvious words to describe more complex emotions. As a result, they can neither regulate nor describe their emotions in order to access appropriate support.

One phrase RULER teaches is: “If you can name it, you can tame it,” meaning that if you can pinpoint the exact emotion you are experiencing, you’re in a better place to manage that feeling.

The Mood Meter aligns with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) guidance on social and emotional learning, which references the importance of supporting children to accurately recognise their own emotions and understand how emotions influence behaviour.

3. The Meta-Moment

This tool offers a memorable routine to help pupils to stay calm when things don’t go right and it gives them the ability to use a regulation strategy. The children are also taught the science behind the emotion they are feeling. In Meta-Moment sessions, children develop and practise a range of strategies to regulate their emotions. These can include positive self-talk, reframing, mindfulness and much more.

Self-management is a core element of the EEF’s guidance on social and emotional learning, which describes research by Blair and Raver (2015) that suggests all children need to be taught impulse control.

4. The Blueprint

If something does go wrong, how do you fix it? The children are taught a RULER version of restorative justice called the Blueprint, whereby children reflect on their own emotions and ability to regulate while developing empathy.

Teaching social awareness through discussion to develop understanding of other people’s perspectives is the first recommendation of the EEF social and emotional learning guidance, and one that the report says is crucial.

So, did it work in our setting? We found that tweaks were needed to make RULER more user-friendly for UK teachers, such as changing some of the taught language. And naturally, introducing something new to a large, successful school created some challenges. Despite having a team of enthusiastic, intelligent and caring members of staff, supporting mental health was completely new to them and something that hadn’t even been mentioned as part of their teacher training.

As a result, some staff didn’t understand the importance of the lessons and saw it as an “add on”, forgetting that unless children feel safe and secure, they are unable to learn effectively. This meant that, initially, some wellbeing lessons got left off the timetable when a week was busy, and sometimes lessons reverted back to the more familiar circle time. To combat this, we raised the lessons’ profile by increasing training, ensuring that RULER was given priority on the timetable and ensuring that it lived and breathed throughout the whole school, not just during standalone lessons.

As a school, we have created a scheme of work, a language progression list, assessment and booklets for the children, which are used during lessons based upon the RULER tools. The booklets include long-term, well-practised strategies to support pupils’ wellbeing, and this mean teachers don’t have to spend hours planning lessons. The booklets support a reduction in workload and also mean that teachers can be flexible when they teach the lessons.

Our language progression list is relatively short but is systemic throughout the school. The emphasis is on teaching a handful of words each year really well and on subtle distinctions between the words. By the time children leave our school in Year 6, they are adept at using a range of emotional vocabulary to describe how they are feeling.

This means that all staff, regardless of their own backgrounds or teacher training, can teach social and emotional lessons to a high standard. The impact has been significant. We have noticed that most children can articulate and accurately describe their emotions. There are fewer barriers to learning within the class and behaviour has improved substantially. Ultimately, most children now know how to regulate their emotions. As teachers and staff, we feel we know the children far better than before and have solid strategies to help them with their wellbeing.

We are now working with schools across the country to help them to introduce whole-school strategies to support children’s mental health. We’re well on our way to ensuring that every child has their mental health considered just as much as their physical health.

Michael Eggleton is head of school and designated safeguarding lead at Charles Dickens Primary School in south-east London

This article originally appeared in the 10 July 2020 issue under the headline “Four golden rules for supporting mental health”