CYP Now – School meets pupils’ emotional health needs

ACTION

As opposition leader at the start of the year, the Prime Minister launched Labour’s Child Health Action Plan to create the healthiest and happiest generation of children ever. The plan contained some bleak statistics about how children in the UK were falling behind the rest of the world not only in physical attributes such as height and obesity but also in terms of mental health and happiness. The commitment to change this is within the government’s mission to make the NHS fit for the future – one of five missions highlighted by the new Labour administration.

Creating a future where children are happy is one of three goals in the Child Health Action Plan. To be honest we’d like to refine it slightly and say a future where children are emotionally healthy. It seems an unrealistic goal for children to be happy all the time, more important is to provide them with the emotional health to cope with the ups and downs of life successfully.

The actions behind this goal include cutting waiting lists for mental health services, introducing specialist mental health support for children and young people in every school and delivering an open access children and young people’s mental health hub for every community. These are all laudable actions, but our concern is that they remain too focused on the sharp end, the point of crisis or difficulty. Where is the early intervention? Where is the universal prevention? Where are the actions which will equip children and young people with good emotional health as a foundation to good mental health and therefore happiness – the ability to navigate both the joy and the challenges of growing up and life in general?

Good emotional health is a set of skills and beliefs which equip the individual to navigate the highs and lows of life and develop the relationships with themselves and others necessary for life and for happiness in its broadest sense (see box).

There are two key actions which will develop good emotional health and thus change society. The first is by modelling. If we improve the capabilities of adults around children, then they will grow up in environments where good emotional health is simply part of everyday life. In the same way that they learn to speak and behave by observing the adults around them, children will also develop good emotional health by observing the behaviour and actions of those around them. Parents, carers, grandparents, teachers – indeed any adult in the life of a child needs to have and model good emotional health.

There are of course people who haven’t had, or might not get access to, this modelling and so it is important that we also provide opportunities and programmes for adults to discover and develop their own emotional health in education settings, workplaces and communities.

The Centre for Emotional Health has been working with United Learning to train their team to deliver an emotional health-based programme. One place where this has happened is North Oxfordshire Academy where staff have been trained to deliver the Talking Teens programme which is one of the various programmes The Centre for Emotional Health offers based on their Nurturing Programme.

Talking Teens is grounded in the most recent research on adolescence and provides a positive view of teenage development focussing on relationships within the family, communication, negotiation, decision-making and strategies to reduce conflict. The outcomes for parents and children include improved relationships between teenagers and parents, reduced conflict and stress in the family, increased confidence in talking about difficult issues and better understanding of teenagers’ needs and development.

North Oxfordshire Academy is a secondary school in Banbury with 1,037 students on roll. They have 30% of pupils receiving pupil premium and 24% with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Their catchment area includes areas of deprivation listed within the worst 25% of England.

The school approached The Centre for Emotional Health for support in addressing the fact that the waiting list for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) for their students was six years. At the time, Oxfordshire County Council was struggling to support SEND pupils and the school was seeking to overturn a poor reputation.

The school was particularly attracted by the fact that The Centre for Emotional Health’s approach is relational and empowering and highlights the link between behaviour and feelings in the context of relationships. The programme develops self-awareness, empathy and self-regulation, supporting people to build and maintain positive relationships.

The school had put a large amount of support in place for their pupils using specialist teams to deliver in-house support and one external therapist and an onsite counsellor. It was recognised that to really make a change the pupil’s whole family needed support as well – consequently, 18 members of staff have been trained and Talking Teens groups have been running since January 2023.

IMPACT

The Centre for Emotional Health supported the school with measuring the impact of the programme through pre and post programme questionnaires to calculate a Life with Your Teenager score.

The school has a 100% success rate of those attending the groups feeling more empowered and having better relationships with their teenagers. The average change in score was an 8.7 improvement.

Staff speak with parents and carers daily about the strategies in the programme and the students can see a more joined up approach between home and school. This is the key to lasting change.

Feedback from parents includes comments like: “Even though my situation is still difficult, I understand my child more and how to deal with many situations that I originally struggled with. I also understand we are not the only ones going through this.”

The goal of raising the healthiest and happiest generation of children is an excellent one and efforts to deal with the mental health of our children and young people is certainly a significant step in this direction. However, foundational change will only come if we build a generation with good emotional health. This will only happen by working with the adults around the children as well as the children and young people themselves. The good news, as can be seen from the example of the North Oxfordshire Academy is that it can be done.

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL HEALTH?

Emotional health refers to the underlying skills and beliefs we have that impact our thoughts, feelings and behaviours in relation to our social and emotional functioning. There are a range of skills, or “assets”, that make up our emotional health. Importantly, these assets do not work in isolation, they are interconnected and complement and influence one another. Some of these assets are intrapersonal, meaning they relate to the ‘self’ and the way we understand and manage the thoughts we have about ourselves. On the other hand, the beliefs we have about others, our social awareness and relationship skills are interpersonal and focus on the way we think about and interact with others.

Using this model allows us to assess the link between having good emotional health and being able to develop and maintain healthy and supportive relationships. In turn, we can explore the impact of supportive relationships on a person’s mental health. An individual’s emotional health is also shaped by the different environmental contexts they are immersed in on a daily basis.

These environmental contexts, which can include families, schools, communities and workplaces, can either support the development of someone’s emotional health competencies, or they can undermine and disable them.

Having good emotional health does not mean someone will be happy all the time. It’s normal and appropriate to feel difficult emotions in response to adverse life events, like losing a job or the death of a loved one. This does not mean our emotional health is ‘bad’. The way someone is feeling at any given time, whether happy, sad or stressed, can more accurately be referred to as their emotional wellbeing. While having good emotional health does not mean someone will always be free from difficult emotions, our emotional health competencies can support people to understand and navigate these.

FURTHER READING

Strong Foundations – Why everyone needs good emotional health and how to achieve it, Demos, February 2024