Nurturing Mental Health with Wellbeing Apps for Young People

Child and adolescents are experiencing a mental health crisis that is affecting all areas of education. How can schools and teachers help students build resilience and positive mental health so they can cope with the increased stress of modern society? Our editor, Jory Debenham, explores some of the apps available to help support our young people.

It is difficult to know exactly why there is what seems to be a sudden increase in mental health problems in young people. Provision for mental health wellbeing is being made at all levels of policy, in governments, schools, trusts, etc., but still the problem persists. It is possible that in some cases, the increase may be related to increased awareness, which accompanies overall improvements in knowledge about wellbeing and an increased belief that everyone has the right to feel good about life and have all their needs met. This situation is much different from past generations where hardship and trauma were more widespread and therefore people had different expectations and ways of coping.

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      string(5812) "Donovan Miller.The Foundation runs a Cricket Academy for 16-24 year olds. Some are excluded from school, others are former offenders. There are gang members and Afghan refugees on the project. Young people struggling to find their way in life, who without assistance, might never fulfil their true potential. During their first year at the Academy, the youngsters work with coaches on a personal development plan that aims to help them become more employable. They get visits from local employers and careers advisers, whose staff talk to the young people about job hunting, CVs, courses and aspirations. They also take a cricket coaching course, and in year two, will coach their own community teams. When they do play cricket, coaches focus on how aspects of the game apply to wider life. Decision making, communication, leadership and cooperation take precedence over technique training. ‘It’s how and when you apply your skills that makes the difference,’ Donavan Miller says. Miller’s coaching style is more youth worker than school teacher. The young people thrive on the responsibility he affords them. As practice matches play out on Cricket 4 Change’s Plough Lane cricket ground, the youngsters take time for a laugh and a joke, to chill out while they’re waiting to bat and engage each other with a bit of good nature banter. When the game starts, however, they’re watching, thinking, making decisions about how to best get the upper hand. ‘Through cricket young people learn discipline, responsibility and how to set goals,’ Miller says. ‘We use what happens in the games to show young people the consequences of their actions, and how what they do affects others.’Chris Wright believes that sports provision targeted at health and wellbeing needs, would not just help students with diagnosable mental health issues, or people from poorer communities. ‘It could also be talented, high achieving students who have a high level of expectation around them, either from parents, teachers and peers, who suffer from mental health problems,’ he says.Wright adds that schools need to redefine the purpose of PE and sport, working out how best to use it to teach life skills. ‘For school leadership this is a cultural issue,’ he says, ‘to do with the emphasis schools place on the role of PE and the time they give to it. Schools are under pressure to devote more of their time, and their pupils’ time, to academia and testing. This determines how staff are performance managed and how schools are funded.’Schools, today, seem to have less belief in how PE can help them perform better. In a briefing paper to MPs before the recent election, the YST explained that less than one in five children meet the current recommended minimum physical activity guidelines. To combat this, they want schools to engage the least active through specialist provision.YST wants to see physical activity opportunities embedded into every school day. Every school, the charity believes, should have targeted programmes to engage the least active, while also looking at ways to increase the activity levels of all children. Evidence, they say, shows that increasing the physical activity levels of the least active produces the greatest reduction in chronic disease.YST would also like to see a stronger role for Ofsted in ensuring health and wellbeing provision in schools remains high profile. Current guidance should be strengthened, the Trust argues, and additional measures added, so inspectors can measure explicitly, pupils’ all-round physical and emotional wellbeing. This, the charity says, should be included in school league tables alongside other accountability measures.The Youth Sport Trust also wants the government to include children’s physical activity indications in the Public Health Outcomes Framework (PHOF) The PHOF, produced by the Department of Health, sets out a vision for public health with desired outcomes and indicators. The current framework measures and provides targets for adult levels of physical activity, but not children’s. The Government, YST believes, should introduce a physical activity outcome measuring the percentage of children, by gender, socio-economic status, disability and ethnicity, who are achieving the Chief Medical Officers’ physical activity guidelines.‘We want to challenge the perception of PE as a separate, not influential part of whole school, business,’ Chris Wright says. ‘ If there is going to be a whole-school Health and Wellbeing Champion whole as part of a school’s senior leadership team, we believe that this person should be from the PE department.’According to the 2013 Sport and Recreation Alliance report, the Game of Life, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder reduces life expectancy by sixteen to twenty five years. 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Inclusion

Good Sport, Bad Sport and Children's Mental Health

17 Oct 2017

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      string(6022) "Counsellor and child in discussionsIn 2017, 98 per cent of teachers and school leaders came into contact with pupils they believed were experiencing mental health problems, according to a National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers Teacher’s survey. And with children spending 190 days at school per year, teachers are in a prime position to provide much-needed support to pupils with mild to moderate mental health problems. This is reinforced in the recent (2017)Government Green Paper, Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision,which states, ‘There is evidence that appropriately-trained and supported staff such as teachers, school nurses, counsellors, and teaching assistants can achieve results comparable to those achieved by trained therapists in delivering a number of interventions addressing mild to moderate mental health problems such as anxiety, conduct disorder, substance use disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder’. Research also shows that, on average, it takes 10 years for a child to get help for a mental health condition (Centre for Mental Health, Missed Opportunities Report, 2016)—and even then, only half who seek help get better, so teachers play a crucial role in spotting, addressing and mitigating mental health issues early on.But before schools can appropriately tackle poor mental health, it is essential that they take a step back and understand the causes behind ill mental health and the transition from emotional pain, which is experienced by us all, to mental health problems. Emotional pain for children and teenagers may be caused, for example, by their parents separating, an illness or a death in the family, multiple house moves or bullying at school. The impact this can have needs to be understood and normalised by schools. Before discussing mental health conditions, schools should first focus on providing children with a space to talk about painful life experiences and offer appropriate support. The wealth of scientific research on ‘social buffering’ (having someone at the time of the painful life experience, to listen, empathise and understand) shows that this can prevent students’ emotional pain transitioning into a mental health issue.  Adverse Childhood Experiences Countless research suggests that painful childhood experiences that occur without ‘social buffering’ at the time of occurence have a significant impact on children’s behaviour, attendance and learning outcomes. The Adverse Childhood Experience and Toxic Stress: A Public Health Crisis study found that children with three or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as those mentioned above, were three times more likely to experience academic failure, five times more likely to have attendance problems and six times more likely to have behavioural problems. For those with four or more ACEs, more than 50 per cent were likely to have learning problems and were 32 times more likely to have behaviour problems. For teachers, knowing that early identification of the warning signs that a student’s painful life experience or emotional pain could, if not addressed, become a mental health problem, is critical. Some key signs to keep an eye out for include: marked changes in concentration, losing ability to focus on learning, staring out the window, tiredness and low self-esteem. More concerning signs and symptoms to watch for could include isolation and withdrawal from peers, parents also reporting marked deterioration in several areas of functioning, and indications of serious self-harm or suicidal ideation. In these cases, the pupil should be referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.     Our results-driven culture and focus on academic outcomes is also adding to widespread mental health problems in schools. Exams are frequently cited as one of the worst stressors facing pupils. In a recent National Education Union survey of teachers (April 2018), 82 per cent said tests and exams had the biggest negative impact on mental health, with exams causing children acute stress, and many pupils breaking down in class due to the pressure or turning to self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Counselling service Childline receives a surge of calls from young people during the SATs and GCSE season, and reported receiving 3,135 calls from young people about tests and exams in 2016/17, an increase of 11 per cent over the previous two years, according to statistics from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Problems sleeping and eating, school avoidance, panic attacks, self-harm and suicide are increasingly being reported among young people during exam time. Student wellbeing is just as important as academic outcomes, and needs to be treated as such. In fact studies show that paying attention to student wellbeing improves academic outcomes. Until government education authorities, such as the Department for Education, Ofsted and the Regional Schools Commissioners, balance the scales between wellbeing and academic achievement, there will continue to be a mental health problem in schools. The UK should look to other countries that are less testing-focused and follow their lead. Finland, for example, epitomises progressive education policy, with a later introduction to formal schooling (age seven) and no tests in primary schools (pupils are only tested at 18) and was ranked fourth in the world for reading in the last Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in 2016. The United Kingdom"
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Special Needs

Averting Disaster

6 Feb 2019

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      string(5725) "Less trauma for childrenContextualising traumaTo discuss trauma in this context is to discuss the creation of an environment where children feel safe at school, where their experiences are taken into account, and where they know that they will be supported, understood and heard. Trauma, the psychological response that happens after witnessing or experiencing a distressing event or series of events, is particularly common in children who have experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). These can be leading causes of both physical and mental illness and can have an adverse effect on children’s ability to be present in an educational context, to learn effectively and to build resilience. Children who have experienced trauma often develop what are known to practitioners as ‘survival behaviours’ to help to manage the extreme stress that trauma can bring. These can include physical violence towards others or themselves, eating disorders, becoming closed off around other people and paying decreased attention to risk. While these issues are all incredibly serious in their own right and are worthy of intervention, in a school setting there is a combined challenge—how to implement an approach which makes a tangible positive difference to the lived experience of children who have experienced trauma, while also ensuring that in your role as school leader, you are continuing to provide the high-quality educational standards that they deserve. Research has repeatedly shown that the presence of protective factors in childhood can be incredibly positive in helping children to cope with the detrimental effects of ACEs and improving the life chances of children who have experienced trauma. One such protective factor is access to interventions from emotionally available adults, which act as a buffer to give children who have experienced trauma the space to work through their experiences in a safe and secure environment. This forms one of the key cornerstones of the implementation of trauma-informed practice, which has repeatedly been shown to have a transformative effect on children in schools.  While I strongly believe that a trauma-informed approach is applicable to every type of school, as a leader of an Alternative Provision (AP) provider, this is particularly crucial. Many of our pupils arrive having been permanently excluded from mainstream schooling, often for exhibiting symptoms of survival behaviours. Some of our pupils have special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) or social, emotional and mental health needs, while some come from backgrounds where they experience trauma on a daily basis. Given their backgrounds, for our pupils, it’s critical that we pay attention to their individual circumstances and invest in listening and understanding each of their individual stories.   A trauma-informed approach in practiceThe Government’s December 2017 Green Paper, Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision, advocates that appropriately trained staff in schools can achieve comparable results to trained therapists in addressing mild to moderate mental health problems. Organisations such as Trauma Informed Schools UK have also backed this approach.  At our Trust, we are always looking for innovative practices and well-informed research to ensure we are continuing to provide the very best possible educational standards for our pupils, while also delivering the high-quality social and emotional support they need. We are passionate about the implementation of trauma-informed principles across all our sites, including our ACE Schools Plymouth sites and Courtlands Special School, where pupils have experienced exceptionally high levels of trauma.Through adopting a trauma-informed approach, practitioners across our sites focus on the pupil as an individual and contextualise their learning experience by taking their past experiences into account. We place an emphasis on emotional and social wellbeing, as well as teaching and learning, with our ‘Safe, Secure, Happy’ ethos, which is evident in everything we do.We take time to devise personalised plans for our pupils based on their specific difficulties, and a cornerstone of this is ensuring that we meet with these pupils on a regular basis to provide a sense of continuity and access to a trusted, reliable, emotionally available adult. 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Inclusion and Pupil Premium

Alternative Provision Is Full Of Traumatised Children – A New Practice Is Needed

13 May 2019

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Leadership

Educational And Emotional Health Outcomes In Adolescence Following Maltreatment In Early Childhood

16 Jul 2018