09/10/2024
How to treat every day as World Mental Heath Day
Sara Thomas, Assistant Head of School, Wellbeing Lead, ACS International School Cobham
World Mental Health Day serves as a helpful reminder that we, as educators, must focus on children’s mental health not just today, but every single day.
Research shows that having poor wellbeing during school is very likely to have a knock-on effect on other areas of a child’s school life. By prioritising wellbeing in the school environment, we can ensure it isn’t an afterthought and create more positive school experiences, and most importantly, happier students who can thrive.
Staff collaboration
Supporting student mental health is all about being proactive and preventing crisis: being able to act quickly before situations escalate is essential. At ACS International School Cobham, we are fortunate to have a comprehensive, universal level of support available for every student, on a daily basis. However, the responsibility for students’ welfare should never sit solely with teachers. For us, this has manifested in having even more trained counsellors, safeguarding leads, and Mental Health First Aiders on site, in addition to wellbeing support and weekly visits from other dedicated health professionals and therapists. These services have been so well received by our students that we are retaining these increased services.
Since student wellbeing is a shared priority for all school staff, one effective practice is to implement cross-departmental and collaborative staff meetings that focus on each student’s overall wellbeing. For example, pastoral meetings can involve all relevant representatives, including the school nurse, safeguarding leads, and school counsellors. This way, staff are able to work together to identify and unpick potential student issues by sharing observations they have made recently which other staff may not have picked up on.
Boarding students
As an international boarding school, we have identified our boarding students to be our most vulnerable cohort where ongoing preventative mental health support is especially important. This is why we have made the decision to have a student to staff ratio that is a lot higher than the average boarding school, with over 20 members of residential staff, including Head of Boarding, experienced House Parents, and tutors, looking after our 193 boarders. A strong, familiar staff presence is the best way we have found to ensure positive student wellbeing.
Higher student to staff ratios can help to nurture those all-important close relationships and support happier and healthier young people while they are living away from home. Holding regular one-to-one meetings to check in with every boarder is crucial to identify any warning signs that might otherwise go missed by staff. At ACS Cobham, we have found that these informal meetings, when coupled with the warm and approachable atmosphere of the boarding house, mean that students feel that they can come to us when they need help or would like to share their worries.
Wellbeing can also be prioritised by filling school life with plenty of extra-curricular opportunities, with continued growth and development at the centre. This can be achieved by structuring the school day, especially for boarding students, to include study time, athletics and musical offerings, and academic challenges, as well as more casual leisure time.
By carefully planning students’ routines this way, they are kept occupied – and busy students are generally happy students, with time still to relax and reflect.
Tackling phone addiction
The mental health of today’s younger generation can be negatively impacted by phone addiction, a growing phenomenon among many schools. While some schools have banned phones entirely, we still need to appreciate that some students cannot manage being completely separated from their phone, and others need them for medical reasons (e.g. diabetics).
While phone addiction has clear negative implications, schools are more likely to support children’s development if they teach them how to use technology in ways that are healthy, purposeful, and life enhancing. A balanced, nuanced approach to phone use can still promote social interaction for children of all ages.
Our own approach to curb phone use has been to implement a new system whereby all students have to lock their phones away in a magnetic pouch at the start of the school day, which they then carry around with them all day, only unlocking the pouch on their way out of school – therefore removing the need to ban phones entirely. We have already noticed that students are much more engaged in conversations with one another, feel less pressure to check their phone, are more focussed in lessons – and have even commented to us that they are appreciative of the new measure.
Becoming more aware
Alongside school wellbeing policies, it is also important to encourage our students to become more aware of how they are feeling. At ACS Cobham, we want students to be able to self-regulate their own emotions and wellbeing. We are excited therefore to be piloting and trialling a brand-new wellbeing app that has been developed for schools called B.E.N. The simple check in tool will encourage students to log their nutrition, sleep, exercise, and other areas every day with a traffic light system, signposting them to the areas they need to focus on for better wellbeing and enabling our staff to view the overall student data and trends across a cohort. This will support students to better understand how their lifestyle can impact their mental health.
By supporting their independence and confidence in this way, schools can ensure that when students leave, they are ready to engage with the world and go on to build a better one.