VIEWS & OPINION
Top tips on mental health
first aid Comment by FLEUR SEXTON, Managing Director, PET-Xi
It’s fair to say childhood mental health has never been more important. According to Mental Health First Aid England, 75% of mental illnesses start before a child reaches their 18th birthday, with 50% of mental health problems in adult life starting before the age of 15. 10% of school children have a diagnosable mental illness, which means that in a class of 30 students, three will have a mental health problem. Sadly, 75% of young people with a mental health problem aren’t receiving treatment, possibly due to the fact that 51% of young people feel embarrassed about mental illness.
While spotting the early warning signs isn’t easy, we can at least list them: • Irritability, frustration, and quick to anger • A decrease in desire to attend social events or activities • Increased complaints • Fatigue and exhaustion • Insomnia • Change in appetite • Forgetfulness • Physical symptoms, like headaches, stomach aches, dizziness, chest pains, and heart palpitations.
With that in mind, here are my tips for helping students keep their mental health in good condition: • Implement an ‘open door’ policy – Ensure your students feel they have
people they can talk to about any concerns they might have. Appointing staff champions of different ages, genders, ethnicities and approaches, helps students feel support is easily accessible to them. • Organisation and planning – Help plan and organise student’s time to make challenges seem less overwhelming. This helps control stress and develops resilience. • Mental health training – Ensure staff are trained to identify the signs of mental illness so help can be provided early on before things escalate. Normalising mental health as a topic of conversation makes it easier for young people to ask for help when needed. • Themed physical activity days – Physical exercise has been shown to significantly raise motivation levels; get students and staff involved in activities. Achievable short term goals help build ability and motivation. • Provide bigger picture support – It helps many students to receive support from dedicated groups and to have access to spaces for prayer, meditation or mindfulness. This helps relieve stress and prevents them becoming overwhelmed when faced with challenges. • Lunchtime activity clubs – Take the strain off students by providing activity clubs to create a sense of perspective in the daily school routine. Drama, arts and crafts, photography or sports help raise their confidence and sense of purpose, especially if school and academic study is challenging. • Summer schools – Providing a post-Covid recovery route during the summer break will provide students with a safe and welcoming place. Even a short summer workshop can have a sizeable effect on a student’s mental health, keeping them engaged and in a positive mindset. • ‘Meet up’ groups – Schedule in 30 minutes to an hour every week in the timetable where students can attend sessions dedicated to allowing them to talk with others and complete tasks as part of a team. Problem solving activities or setting specific challenges helps to build mental health. • Community events and volunteering – volunteering activities and charity events, such as fund raising for their community, develops an awareness of their place in society and their responsibility to others. This reduces stress and improves emotional wellbeing.
Education: thinking skills for a resilient future
Comment by FELICIA JACKSON, Chair of the Learn2Think Foundation
Resilience is something that most people recognise we need, even if they don’t exactly agree what it means. Is it surviving things that happen to you, adapting to challenges, the capacity to recover quickly, or simply ‘keeping calm and carrying on’? As our children face an increasingly transforming world, how can we teach them the skills to be resilient in the face of change? Complexity is something that we don’t talk about often enough.
Teaching itself is a complex process, as teachers must communicate with children with a range of interests, motivations, fears and understandings. Yet while we accept that different children might require different support, we haven’t really changed the way in which we approach the subjects that children learn. Complexity engenders excitement but it also makes the brain use different thought processes including problem solving and creativity. Teaching complex ideas, the interconnections between different
disciplines and the interactions between topics can educate children about human values while providing a tool set enabling them to engage with complex ideas and situations as they grow. This helps to build resilience, which may be key to surviving 21st century challenges, and enables the
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application of knowledge to ‘wicked problems’ which means, using Rittel and Webber’s theory, problems that are difficult to define and maybe even unsolvable. That doesn’t mean we stop trying though. At Learn2Think we are using Tolerance Day 2021 as a focal point to
explore how the way we think affects climate justice, and the kind of world in which we want to live. We need to embed questioning and critical thinking at the heart of learning, combined with empathy and creativity so that we can not only imagine ourselves in another’s shoes, but also imagine new ways of solving someone else’s problems It’s no longer enough to educate in isolation, in silos, as that approach is
responsible for so many of the ‘wicked problems’ the world faces today. Whether it’s climate change, racial injustice or covid vaccinations, we need to teach a new way to approach problems. In terms of vaccinations for example, the phrase “no one is safe until everyone is safe” seems wholly self-evident. And yet 60% of the world’s population hasn’t even had its first vaccination: supplies are not reaching the poorest. This is not only a moral failing but a system one, which provides more opportunity for new variants to arise and bring the pandemic storming back. It’s the same in education – how do you solve a complex problem? We
know that improving literacy is linked to improved educational attainment but how best do we achieve those positive outcomes? Is improving literacy child by child the best approach, or should we deal with the impacts of poverty, racial inequality, budgeting issues or other wider social issues? So many of today’s biggest challenges are system wide and ‘wicked’.
To tackle them effectively, our children must learn differently in order to think differently. We have talked about radical empathy and its importance in developing children’s thinking in ways that make them adaptive and resilient, able to respond to an increasingly changing environment – technologically, socially and environmentally. And the first step is to recognize that children understand complexity. If we encourage them to think about complex issues from an early age, we may be giving them the resilience and power to change their own futures.
May 2021
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