FEATURE FOCUS: MENTAL HEALTH & WELLBEING
It’s time to treat our youngsters as humans first, pupils second
I
n our second feature in September 2019 on mental health and wellbeing in schools, we
heard from Jakki Rogers, a primary headteacher with a background in Outdoor Pursuits. Working in schools in areas of low socio-economic status she has, for a long time, recognised the need to ‘do learning differently’ placing the emphasis on educating the whole child and not just focussing on academic achievement. A passionate advocate of outdoor learning, Jakki has always ensured her pupils are outside in all weathers taking advantage of the rich learning opportunities and mental health benefits of the great outdoors. I have been a teacher for twenty-two years, for
the last six of those I was a headteacher. My first headship was in a school in Brixton and the second in a Greater Manchester primary, which whilst leafier than the urban context of South London, provided very similar challenges in terms of working with cohorts of children who faced difficulties that you would not wish on your worst enemies. I am no expert in mental health disorders, but I know education pretty well and I can see that most UK schooling has compounded the issues rather than helping to alleviate them. Anecdotally I think that most school staff
would claim that incidences of mental health disorders are on the increase and certainly, the statistics back this up. According to the NHS digital resources site, • One in eight young people aged eight to nineteen had at least one mental disorder when tested in 2017. (12.8%)
• Rates of emotional disorders (including anxiety and depressive disorders, mania and bipolar affective disorder) have increased in both boys and girls, up from 4.3% in 1999 and 3.9% in 2004, to 5.8% in 2017.
• Children and young people with a mental 24
www.education-today.co.uk Editor’s Choice 2020
health disorder are more likely to play truant (8.5%) from school than those without a disorder (0.8%). School exclusion was also more common in those with a disorder (6.5%) versus those without (0.5%) NHS Digital, Mental Health of Children and Young People in England 2017
• A recent UK analysis reported a 68% increase in hospital self-harm presentations in 13-16 year old girls between 2011 (45.9 per 100 000) and 2014 (76.9 per 100 000) Morgan et al. 2017 -
https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j4351 A further read through the NHS article validates
the general assumption that young people from the least affluent socio-economic backgrounds
are more likely to suffer from mental health disorders than those from backgrounds that are more affluent. This means that those with the fewest amount of financial resources often are the ones that need the most help – help that is increasingly hard to find in these days of austerity when local authority and NHS services have been denuded to the point of ineffectiveness. There are many contributing factors in schools
to our increasing numbers of young people enduring mental health concerns. Pupils in English schools face a higher frequency of statutory testing than other European school systems. Throughout the age ranges these tests are high stakes for the schools with Ofsted breathing down the necks of those under-performing the national averages (irrespective of the cohort, context or budgetary position of the settings!).
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