Be part of the schools wellbeing movement
Our consultation with Teacher Tapp examining the mental health and wellbeing of thousands of teachers across the country has ended. Thank you, we have had a fantastic response! This is the final piece talking about the response we received and the report that will follow.
If the public didn’t realise how important school staff wellbeing is, they do now.
Over 2,000 people a day responded to the surveys we ran over three days with Teacher Tapp. These findings give us a great foundation for exploring how we can best support school staff. At a time of great concern about children’s mental health it’s a reminder that the wellbeing of school staff matters and that if we don’t recognise this we will fail not only the staff, but the children they support.
In addition to the Teacher Tapp survey we asked members of Schools in Mind – our learning network for school leaders and staff – a series of qualitative questions and invited them to share best practice. We optimistically aimed to collect 200 responses from our network. In fact we were overwhelmed by contributions. In the first day alone we received over 400 responses and we now have over 650.
So what are we going to do with this information? Well in the last week of June we’ll publish our findings, which will include examples of good practice. All members of Schools in Mind will receive a copy of our report so if you would like a copy join us here. In July we will also be running a series of workshops on school staff wellbeing in Norfolk, Southampton, London and Liverpool to continue our conversation about teacher wellbeing.
The information we collate will help us build a library of best practice, which we will share with our members. We know that the wellbeing of school staff is essential to promoting wellbeing in schools.
Schools in Mind is a network, a space where people can share learning. We all have our areas of expertise and we can all do aspects of our work better if our experiences and learning is shared. This consultation was launched in that spirit.
As well as sharing learning from other schools we are gathering data on promoting mental health in schools from over 2,000 schools that we carry out research with. We are evaluating HeadStart, a five-year, £56 million National Lottery funded programme set-up by the Big Lottery Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK. It aims to explore and test new ways to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people aged 10 to 16 and prevent serious mental health issues from developing. We are collecting data on 30,000 children in 144 schools.
We are rolling out the mental health and schools link programme, which we developed with support from the DfE to 1,200 schools and colleges. Our Education for Wellbeing programme is conducting trials into mental health interventions in over 400 schools.
So if you want to be part of the schools wellbeing movement, join our Schools in Mind network so that we can all learn from each other and promote children’s wellbeing by giving them and the staff who work with them the best possible environment to thrive!
Jaime Smith is Director of the Mental Health and Wellbeing in Schools Programme at The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families.
We would like to thank all those who supported our consultation including: Teacher Tapp, Dr Peter Fonagy, Dr Emma Kell, Mrs Humanities, Adrian Bethune, NAHT, Twinkl and Jaime Smith.