Mel Standbrook (Chair of Governors): Importance of Children's Wellbeing

In this episode, Claire talks to Mel Standbrook a Chair of Governors at a primary school in Lincolnshire. Due to the locality of the school, Mel informs Claire that the school was categorized as a category 5 school by the DfE because of the deprivation levels. The staff at the school quickly acknowledged the need to educate themselves, in order to support pupils with their mental well-being. After asking various people, researching and seeking advice they started developing interventions to support children at the school. After enrolling children on to the workshops, they quickly noticed the positive impact it had on children’s mental well-being. Furthermore, the staff noticed that when children were signposted to them from outside agencies, they did not progress as much as their in-house children did. As a Chair of Governors, Mel speaks about the techniques used within her school to support children with mental health and well-being. She talks in great detail, about the various different workshops implemented and practiced at her school. With the growing success of the different strategies, the staff at the school decided to continue raising awareness of and supporting children subject to mental health with new training and techniques. In addition to seeing a positive impact on the children, the SLT and governors quickly noticed the staggering impact it had on the staff’s well-being. Teachers and non-teaching staff were also engaging in the mental health techniques and this positively changed the culture within the school. In the podcast, Mel describes the importance of raising awareness about mental health, mental well-being and emotions amongst young children. She divulges in the various techniques used to deliver this, in addition to commenting on how it has affected children and staff within her school. Mel explains how and when the activities are conducted within the school, as well as describing the support available for parents and teachers at the school. KEY TAKEAWAYS Raising awarenessChildren should be aware of what mental health is and how it may affect them. They may be unknowingly suffering from it. Workshops, activities, circle time, display boards, assemblies and interventions should be carried out to raise aware and offer support to children. Have an assembly every week focussed on mental health, discuss and explore that emotion. Explain to children what that emotions means and what it does. Normalising mental health emotionsChildren should be exposed to the language and emotions related to mental health such as joy, anger, grief, loss etc. They should know what each emotion means and be given the opportunity to talk about it in a safe and open environment. Schools should conduct workshops, assemblies and carry out classroom activities for children to be able to deepen their understanding. This vocabulary and knowledge can subsequently support their academic and writing quality. Whole school mental health ethosHaving resources that are easily accessible for children to display their emotions. This can be in the form of an emotional circle, circle time or a display board with emotions, where children can place their name or an object to show how they feel. This allows children to own their emotion and show the teacher how they feel on that day. The emotions displayed can vary from class to class. Emotions can include happiness, anger, tiredness, excitement etc. The school noticed that staff also started to display their emotions of the day, on the board. This developed a sense of empathy between the students and pupils. This encouraged an open and honest discussion between the pupils and teachers to talk about their feelings and emotions. CPD and trainingReceiving adequate training and support to aid children with mental health is paramount. This allows issues and problems to be tackled at an early stage rather than at a high-level stage when the child becomes even more vulnerable. Weekly inputUsing different sessions and pockets of time during the week or day to talk about mental health in a safe and positive way. Using reading sessions and allowing children the opportunity to read books about feelings and emotions. Enabling children to talk about how that books make them feel and reflecting upon that emotion. Mental health well-being for staffCPD offered to staff within the school. Over the years, the have persevered with the approaches and found ways to improve their strategies and techniques. Within staff training, they carry out games and are awarded mental health prizes. Prizes include items that will improve and support their mental health, including mental health books, self-esteem cards etc. Teachers are asked what they do for self-care. Within the staffroom, there is a staff well-being board with some tips and tricks on how staff can look after themselves. SLT do ‘check ins’ by saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to staff. They encourage staffroom meet and greets by ensuring all staff get together. Staff well-being day – all staff who work over 10 hours that staff well-being day can take a day off. Workload for staffChecking up on each other. The school has developed an ethos of offering their help and support to one another. On staff trainings, teachers and staff are mixed up to allow them the opportunity to communicate and interact with staff they wouldn’t daily. Supporting parentsThe school predominantly uses social media to interact, raise awareness and educate parents about mental health. The school encourages and promotes and open-door policy of allowing parents to come and speak to staff and pastoral workers about any issues they are facing. They use the Cornerstone curriculum, carry out Wow events every term, in addition to the conventional meetings such as parent’s evenings etc. Designated learning sessions – an opportunity for parents to come and get involved in their child’s learning. The session includes children completing art and crafts activities and parents observing the learning children are involved in. Parents of the school have used social media mediums to inform others of what their child has taught them about mental health, if they believe they are suffering from mental issues from their child’s new learning and if they are seeking medical advice. Through social media, the school were able to identify if the parents had any concerns about their child’s mental health as they referred to their children on their comments.  Configurations of SelfA theory by David Mearns which focuses on person centred therapy. As a person you come in with lots of different dialogues of self, for example a happy self, a sad self, an anxious self. Improving well-being in the classroomLook at and normalise emotions, emotional awareness and emotional language. Learning what emotions are and encouraging children to express how they are feeling. Children and teachers should own their emotions in a safe environment. Well-being techniquesTermly workshops focused on well-being and emotions. Five ways to well-being and breathing.   BEST MOMENTS “Our pupils were struggling with their own mental health but actually because of our lack of understanding at the time, it was how we can make that better or what it was. We needed to realise what that was and dig deep into it.” “After lots of research and actually asking for help from lots of different people, companies and just saying what is, how can we move forward with it. We initially came up with a few things that maybe some of our pupils are struggling with anxiety. We had children that had been referred on from us to different agencies but actually had got nowhere.” “How can we help them, so we didn’t have to signpost them out. How can we help them in house before signposting them to different agencies because actually what we found is when we signposted [them] into different agencies they came back lost that they haven’t got any further. Then the blame was back on to us. We reached out to different companies and they said actually we can see that you might have issues with these various types of mental health.” “Enabling children to be well.” “That child who’s been to counselling is now discussing with other children what their problems were or what they were struggling with. We are very high on pupil voice, so pupil voice is a real strength, so actually our pupils were going to other pupils and saying this is what I’m doing and the other pupils are saying ‘I don’t what it is’ or ‘I feel that as well.’” “Let’s be open and honest with everybody. Before we’d got there, we’d gone to the parents as well. We approached the parents and said this is what we’re going to do, this is the pathway we are going down. We want to open up that language about mental health. We wanted to have those open conversations at home and at school. We did that open-door policy and said to the parents just come and speak to us. If there’s anything you think that is happening come and talk to us. With specialists and people in school, we were dripping that in. It worked out to that normalising emotional language.” “We have classroom activities every week all about mental health. Yoga, mindfulness it’s embedding that language. We have assemblies every single week where we talk about different emotions.” “We started doing (subconsciously), assemblies where you learn about a different emotion every week, using props. Some week they would learn about anger, joy. Different emotions that wouldn’t normally come out in the lessons. All of a sudden, visitors were coming in and saying, ‘oh how do you feel today?’ and a child was saying or in their writing they were saying, ‘I was so excited, or I was joyous.’ Visitors were saying what was that language from a Year 1 pupil.” “Once we normalise that emotional language, we found that everything else has come along so easily. [At] all our workshops, children will speak about different types of mental health.” “The visitor challenged us and said ‘you’re a primary school; Key Stage 1 and 2 and you are learning about grief and loss, is that not quite sad? Is that quite depressing? Do you think that causes problems?’ We said, ‘no because what it does is it provides understanding.’ It was about teaching those children that actually grief and loss isn’t just when somebody dies. It could be when you lose something, it could be the loss of a relationship, it could the breakdown of a home life and it was about discussing that. When the visitor went in, one of our students shared who they were living with and they were sad about living with different people that they had been living with. They had that open and honest conversation with a visitor. “It’s knowing what those feelings are.” “It’s about rebuilding another relationship and understanding what’s happened. Instead of feeling an overwhelming sadness, which then can affect their school life, home life, friends, it’s about giving them knowledge to say, ‘actually I’m sad because this has happened and I need to talk to somebody about it.’ Rather than making the worry really, really big.” “The language just changed around school.” “Parents were coming into us or actually going to our social media and saying, ‘I know I have mental health issues’ or ‘I know I have issues with this because my child has come home and taught me about it or told me about what they’ve been learning.’” “It changed our whole ethos. It changed our whole culture in school.” “We have found that disclosures have gone up because people are coming to us and sharing what their worries are. We have a staff that is designated to pastoral welfare… it’s made our knowledge better.” “[What] we’re able to do is get in at a lower level, so as soon as we recognise it because we’ve got those recognising symptoms, skills and strategies in place we’re immediately being highlighted and this is what we need to do.” “The challenge I always get back is ‘what’s it doing for behaviour? What’s it doing for academic results?’ Since putting in mental health learning and emotional well-being learning, our behaviour data has gone down. We’re getting less incidents of what we categorically call bad behaviour in school.” “That’s not bad behaviour, that’s because that child is managing those emotions.” “The language has to change as you go up to Year 6, it’s different for little ones and the older ones.” “It’s about drip feeding it. Do something every week. You don’t have to learn a whole plethora of emotions in the first week you do it; it’s learning one and knowing what it is.”“We do a lot of reading for mental health, a lot of use of music. We’ve learned about emotions within musical songs. In our reading lessons, we will quite often read a book that is all about emotions, especially in Key Stage 1.” “Children might not be able to understand emotion, so you could always say how does that feel if it was a colour?” “It’s about knowing how that feels in your tummy. That’s something we really push through with the primary school children. How does that feel in your tummy? How does it make you feel?” “People get so disjointed and busy throughout the day… have you connected with somebody? Have you had a chance to sit down and eat your dinner? Have you had the time to breathe?” “Kindness… it’s embedded in the walls. We have benches where children can sit if they are feeling lonely and another children will never leave a child on that bench. They will always go in and say, ‘do you need a friend?’ ‘do you want to do something?’” “We’ve given the power to the children [through pupil voice]. They then feel that they are respected, they are wanted and their voice is heard.” “It’s that sharing culture.” “If somebody is sad in the class, the other students pick up on it immediately.” “If the child has put their peg on anger or angry, but then doesn’t facilitate those conversations, ask for help or find themselves off, we would say to the family welfare office, this child has come in today and put on the circle, they don’t want to talk about it, do you want to have a chat with them? We would put those interventions in. What we are finding is the children come and talk to you before we get to that point where you’ve got to do something about it. That definitely wouldn’t have happened four years ago.” “We find that they move them [the pegs] throughout the day.” “By putting that peg on something, it will encourage that conversation.” “What we found is they [the parents] weren’t coming to us in secret. They were putting on Facebook ‘my child has come home and expressed or shown me this. I think I’ve got these issues, or I think I’m going to go to the doctor and see if I can get help with this.’ It was out loud on Facebook. They say that mental health language and mental health is so hidden and we need to get it out there. We were finding [that] it was because of social media [that it] was so engaging and everybody was going to social media - people were referring in their children.” “They were saying on Facebook ‘because of what’s happened at school I’ve now gone to the doctors and I’ve got this sorted or I’ve got this sorted for my child. Our home life is so much better because of what they’ve been taught.’” “It’s about our own mental health as well. It’s about myself and the headteacher being able to protect ourselves so it’s very much those boundaries. We have to be careful of those boundaries. Answering messages at different times of the night, sometimes you have to think ‘not today.’ The parents do genuinely think we will approach them and we’ll contact them. Sometimes I will say, ‘pop to the office in the morning.’” “We don’t shy away from anything. We do answer everything and we just go for it really. Open-door policy is totally our thing. We do say, ‘just come in and chat to us if you’re worried.’” “I’m really happy about the upcoming RSE curriculum and how it’s asking people to step outside and learn what those emotions are.” “Around school we have tips and tricks. Every time they do a workshop every term, they might learn about sleep in term one so they will learn all about [the] tips and techniques of sleep. They will put that on a listening tree which is in the front foyer. You can, if you are struggling with sleep in a couple of months, you can go back to [the] listening tree and say ‘what did we learn in that workshop?’” VALUABLE RESOURCES Supportive minds: https://supportingminds.com/Five ways to well-being: https://www.mind.org.uk/workplace/mental-health-at-work/taking-care-of-yourself/five-ways-to-wellbeing/Configurations of Self: https://healthpsychologyconsultancy.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/configurations-of-self-in-counselling/ The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/ LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/ ABOUT THE HOSTClaire Riley Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide. Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff. Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend. The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.