Mental health and wellbeing remain a priority at our school. Through PSHE and Focus Weeks we regularly raise the profile of how to understand and look after our mental health and wellbeing.
As young people grow and develop they can often come up against challenging and difficult situations that they need to learn how to navigate. Although it is normal to experience mood changes or anxiety, sometimes we may need extra help to help us understand how to manage what we might be feeling. In school we have a range of bespoke support that is available via a range of trained staff as well as external organisations.
Day-to-day our Student Support Team are available for students to check-in with and discuss any concerns they are having. Often, a friendly face and time to talk can be all that is needed to offer reassurance. From here we can help determine whether more specialist support may be needed. When we feel that further support may be needed we will contact home and discuss the options with parents.
In house, we are fortunate to have a fully trained Hope mentor who is able to offer support via a six-week mentoring programme. In addition to this we have our external counselling service provided by Sarah Terry. Sarah is in school once a week and does one to one work with students around issues such as anxiety and self-esteem. Beyond this, all of our staff have regular training on mental health support, safeguarding support and wider issues too.
As a school, we can offer a range of support but sometimes children need something much more specialised. Further to our in-house offer, we also work with external agencies such as CAMHS and St Giles Hospice.
Also, each week we are also supported by the local NHS Mental Health Support Team. Our key worker visits us each week to work with a number of students and has recently delivered a parent workshop on understanding anxiety in children. A small group of parents attended the session and were grateful for the support and opportunity to discuss issues affecting them at home and learn ways they can support their child. On this occasion the workshop was by invitation only, but we intend to offer similar workshops in the future.
If you would like to be notified of a future workshop, scan the QR code below.
