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How to help pupils lead your mental health approach
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As schools return in September following the coronavirus lockdown, it will be important to have a whole-school approach to mental health and wellbeing, involving the whole school community of staff, students and parents working in partnership.
That’s not easy to do. But we think we can offer some advice.
Boys in Mind/Girls Mind Too is a broad alliance of educational and health professionals, young people and parents based in Bath & North East Somerset. Our main aims are to reduce stigma around mental health, challenge unhelpful stereotypes and ultimately prevent suicide, with a particular focus on boys and young men.
Over the past two years, the organisation has been working alongside 14 local schools on student voice in particular.
How does it work?
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) advises that primary schools and secondary schools should be supported to adopt a comprehensive, ‘whole school’ approach to promoting the social and emotional wellbeing of children and young people.
This approach is supported by Public Health England, which, together with The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, has outlined a set of key actions school leaders can take to promote children and young people’s emotional health and wellbeing based on evidence about what works best. See: Promoting children and young people’s emotional health and wellbeing.
The eight key principles are: Ethos and Environment; Leadership and Management; Teaching and Learning; Student Voice; Staff Development; Monitoring and Evaluation of Impact; Targeted Support; Working with Parents & Carers.
Getting young people involved
The student voice principal may be the most difficult in some schools. Often, student voice can be tokenistic and it can also suffer from being misunderstood.
This is where we can help. We have seen at first-hand the benefits of not just involving young people, but enabling them to take the lead in helping schools become mentally healthy places.
We have found there are many ways in which young people can be involved:
- As part of the development of a Mental Health Strategy Team in school, ensuring that there are student leads within that team alongside key staff and parent representatives.
- Developing a Student Mental Health & Wellbeing Team to feed ideas to the school’s Mental Health Strategy Team. A staff member or members would support this group in the suggested activities below.
- Leading assemblies to help create a supportive ethos and culture and to champion positive mental health for the whole school community.
- Mentoring other students.
- Helping the Mental Health Strategy Team monitor and evaluate provision e.g. by collecting feedback from peers about what is working well, what could be improved.
- Leading campaigns or developing activities such as for World Mental Health Day, Show Racism the Red Card etc.
- Helping spread the word about the kind of support available in and outside school, especially for those young people who need extra support.
- Forming student E Teams (Equalities Teams) to promote equality and help tackle discrimination, such as racism, sexism or HBT (homophobic, biphobic or transphobic) bullying. See Guide to setting up E Teams.
- Making films, podcasts and writing blogs to explore various issues, such as barriers to seeking support or the importance of listening and talking, which can be shown/introduced in assemblies, tutor sessions and PSHE lessons to prompt discussion.
- Advising on PSHE content and activities, which include sessions on how to have supportive, solution-focused conversations.
Benefits of this Approach
There are evident benefits to this kind of approach.
Young people have reported increased confidence in speaking out and seeking support when they are struggling.
Listening skills of both staff and students also improve as do levels of empathy.
And a focus on a mentally healthy ethos is beneficial to staff as well as students: relationships across the school between staff and students and parents improve and young people enjoy the sense of purpose and responsibility, which these roles and activities bring.
To showcase this impact, one of the schools we are working with made a film. You can watch it here
It’s important we get this right in September, because these are challenging times for all in schools. We should help pupils help themselves and others - they are key to everything we do.
Kate Murphy is Boys in Mind co-ordinator and former PSHE Lead for Bath & North East Somerset. Richard Bullar is a former Headteacher and advisor for Boys in Mind. If you are interested in finding out more about BiM’s work and how it could benefit your school please visit www.boysinmind.co.uk for information and contact details.
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