Open Awards Ask the Expert for Mental Health Awareness Week
“What can we do to normalise mental health and wellbeing in education?
As it’s both MentalHealthAwarenessWeek and LearningAtWorkWeek, we wanted to share how education providers can improve mental health and wellbeing within their organisations.
So, we ask the expert – Richard Daniel Curtis from The Root Of It
Combing his experiences as an Open Awards provider, a mental health mentor, and a former teacher, Richard offers a 360 view of wellbeing within education. He shares:
✔️ The importance of mental health training
✔️ The practical steps educators can take
✔️ The importance of community
✔️ How you can access resources and training
✔️ Examples of best practices and successes”*
Why is social, emotional and mental health training so important?
“Everyone experiences periods of poor mental health in their life, it is about whether they have the social and emotional resilience skills to cope with these. When they don’t it can lead to mental health difficulties.
This is where social emotional and mental health training comes in, giving people the tools they need to support others to overcome difficulties they face in their lives”
What practical steps can educators take to improve mental health within their organisation and/or curriculum?
“One of the points we cover in the Level 4 Mental Health Aware Leadership course is to normalise conversations about mental wellbeing. By having the courage to express that you found a situation or time difficult or overwhelming, or by changing the words you use (for example using the phrases poor mental health and mental health difficulties appropriately), you are helping to create a mental health friendly ethos.
As much as we’d like, you are unlikely to meet everyone’s needs all of the time, but you can be empathetic in the way you talk about it. There is evidence from a University of Manchester study that demonstrates that young people feel more able to talk about wellbeing if their teachers are more confident with discussing wellbeing generally.
Ethos is not about shoehorning mental health into subject plans, its about making the day-to-day links to wellbeing in lessons, the natural ones, the ones that aren’t forced in. In reality, most teachers cover aspects of wellbeing and for leaders their role is to help teachers to recognise that they are already doing it and to empower them to make those links.”
What do you think community is important in supporting our mental health?
“A support network is one of the most powerful protective factors in avoiding poor mental health becoming mental health difficulties. Being able to express your emotional experience, seek support, know who to turn to for the support you need, are all skills that contribute towards this. Everyone’s community is different and there are people who you can turn to when you need and there are others who you wouldn’t.
Some people use mentors to help them, others use family or friends, others use colleagues, or for young people, teachers.”
The Root Of It
“The Root Of It was founded in 2013 and exists to help people get to the root of difficulties or barriers. Since then we have influenced the lives of millions of people and our courses have been delivered to thousands of people. We have worked with Open Awards to develop specialist mentoring courses, the Association of Mental Health in Education offers free membership to educational settings (in case anyone reading would like to join) and offers training related to mental health in education.”
Case study: the impact of training on specialist schools
“Over the last few years, we have been working with a group of special schools, the TCES group. Working collaboratively, we have developed a pathway for their young people to develop listening and leadership skills from primary age all the way through to post-16.
The impact of this on the confidence and skills of the young people is transparent and we are looking at extending this over the next few years.”
Find out more about AMHIE training by visiting our community portal on: https://community.amhie.com/training/
Want to ask us something? Ask the expert, Richard Daniel Curtis by calling our members helpline on 02381 120010
*Transcribed from Open Awards:Open Awards LinkedIn