Children’s Mental Health Week 2022

To mark Children’s Mental Health Week 2022, our Trust Consultant Teachers Lauren Munro Hall and Kathryn Ferguson from Notting Hill & Ealing High School talk about the importance of children’s mental health and pastoral care in schools. 

Over the last two years of living with Covid, it has become increasingly clear how important it is to look after our mental health.  We strongly believe the most effective approach to promoting positive mental health is one that involves the whole community: where there is a common goal and shared clarity between parents, staff, students and school. Being part of the GDST allows collaboration between schools to ensure we are providing the best mental health education and care for our students.

As Senior and Junior PSHE Trust Consultant Teachers, our primary goal this year was to unite PSHE Lead Teachers from across all the schools, by organising GDST-wide initiatives.  This has included the creation of an online platform where resources can be shared and teachers are encouraged to pass on tips, advice and expertise, as well as recommend speakers.  

Most importantly though, we aim to facilitate ways for teachers to discover and utilise the best tools to deliver Personal Social & Health Education (PSHE), ensuring that it is not only informative for students, but engaging and valued too.

The GDST strives to create an environment within our schools that allows and encourages girls to talk about the issues that are concerning them, process their feelings and share their experiences. As the next generation navigates their way through adolescence, potentially grappling with the pressures of exams, juggling friendships and worrying about self image, we remain aware and mindful of the increased strain on young people’s mental health.  Teachers from across the GDST are always available to offer support, but we also want to equip our students with practical tools and give them the means to be of a mindset where they feel empowered to face life’s challenges.

This year for Children’s Mental Health Week, which runs from the 7th to the 13th of February, the focus and theme is ‘Growing Together’. This is opportune, as we want to look for ways to enable students from across the GDST to help each other to ‘grow’ their own mental health. Therefore, we are asking PSHE Lead Teachers at each GDST school to collaborate on the creation of our ‘GDST Well-Being Well’. 

Throughout the week, girls are invited to write down their top tips for managing their own wellbeing and emotional health, by recommending strategies, activities or techniques that they themselves had found useful. We want them to tell us about ways they have found to bolster their own self-esteem, how they manage to re-frame a challenging situation, find a different perspective, or suggest simple ideas that help them to feel better about themselves. For example, a student tip from Notting Hill and Ealing Senior School involves ‘listening to my favourite song when I am feeling overwhelmed’ whilst a Sheffield student says ‘I get away from my screen and walk around the block just listening to the sounds around me.’

These contributions are forming the basis of our ‘WellBeing Well’. Each PSHE Lead Teacher is speaking to students within their schools, choosing three inventive, motivational or practical suggestions to put in the central ‘GDST Well Being Well’. Once complete, these tips will then be shared with all the staff and students throughout the GDST. 

Through this initiative, we hope to help our girls realise that students from across the GDST Family have much in common, and that experiencing low mood or anxiety is not only normal, but can often be addressed and alleviated together: in this instance by helping each other ‘grow’ their mental and emotional health together, by sharing suggestions for taking care of their own mental well being. 

GDST prides itself in offering high quality mental health and wellbeing support to every student. This can be observed in our dedication to pastoral care, which ensures mental and physical wellbeing among students. We offer an extensive pastoral care training programme for our staff and have partnered with The Positive Group to develop and roll out the Positive Programme to all of our schools. This program provides a toolkit for cognitive, behavioural, and social skills that are aimed to generate good psychological health among our students. Promoting this environment in our schools ensures that you can not only count on us to be there for our students, but you can count on our students to be there for each other as well.