Mental Health in Education

Building Good Foundations

Samantha Garner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138386327
• eBook ISBN: 9780429762253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Mental health and well-being are becoming increasingly important areas of focus in education, yet schools often find themselves lacking the tools, time and resources to tackle the issues. Mental health support is frequently seen as an additional responsibility of the school setting, rather than a core aspect of it. This practical, fully accessible book provides straightforward guidance and low-budget strategies to help school settings get mental health support right. With a focus on the well-being of both students and staff, chapters focus on techniques to develop self-esteem, manage behaviour and build positive relationships at all levels.

Key features include:

• low-cost and easy-to-implement strategies suitable for the busy classroom environment, as well as whole school approaches
• downloadable activities and planning sheets based on cognitive behavioural therapy techniques
• a focus on building strong foundations based on mental health basics

Refreshingly honest and conscious of the realities of the school environment, this book is a crucial tool for anybody working within education.

Chapter 1

Staff mental health and well-being

Look after the biggest resource

AKA We have to look after staff first!

When we talk about mental health and well-being in education, we are mainly referring to pupils. But what about staff? Staff are the biggest resource in education, and they must be a priority. Staff mental health and well-being is crucial. We cannot talk about mental health in education without discussing staff mental health and well-being, for two reasons. Firstly, staff are human beings (even some of the PE teachers) and their mental health is important, for their own life and for staff retention. Secondly, their mental health, and emotional literacy, is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, influence on pupil mental health and well-being in an education setting.

Staff mental health issues have increased and we are losing a high number of teaching days because of it. In a survey conducted by Leeds Becket University, over half the respondents had a diagnosed mental health condition and the vast majority of respondents believed their mental health issues had a negative effect in the classroom.¹ For those of us who work in mental health, this isn’t a surprise. We understand that mental well-being underpins and affects everything. Everything. Once more for emphasis: EVERYTHING!

Think back to your life up to the age of 16. Who were the key influential people, positive and/or negative, in your life? Now think of the negative influences. I expect they have left you with some lasting negative thoughts about yourself. Think about the mental health of those key influential people. Did they have good positive mental health? Were they emotionally literate (understanding and empathetic)? In most cases I suggest not. For most of you there will be a teacher and/or fellow pupil on either of your lists. Perhaps some are on both the positive and negative list, as this is also possible. You will still remember how they made you feel, and any negative influences can leave deep emotional scars. This is the same for pupils today and we have to ensure that we are a positive, not negative, influence.

As mentioned in the introduction, this isn’t just about being touchy-feely with snowflakes. Supporting pupil mental health and well-being will improve results. The relationship between teacher and pupil is one of the key elements in effective pupil learning. This is supported by lots of research, including:

• “What makes great pedagogy? Nine claims from research”²
• John Hattie, “Invisible Learning”³ and
• Improving Pupils’ Relationships with Teachers to Provide Essential Supports for Learning ⁴

Building good relationships and having good emotional literacy is great pedagogy. It’s part of being a teacher, of working in education. In order to do this, we have to have good mental health ourselves.

Building positive relationships

AKA Being nice to people

Building positive relationships is the basis for everything in life: in business, in personal relationships, everything. It is one of the key elements of happiness according to self-determination theory. Not having positive relationships is a factor in many mental health issues. Our own mental well-being affects our ability to build positive relationships with others (including pupils). It’s vital we acknowledge this.

I suffer with depression, which many people are surprised at because I ‘don’t seem that sort’, which I always think is a tactful way of saying I’m gobby. I manage my depression with medication, understanding, chocolate and CBT techniques. My mental health still has ‘troughs’, but I can recognise the signs. Symptoms of a down period: I reduce my social interaction, sleep more, am angrier and have less capacity to manage stress. It also affects my relationships – the effort of being nice is really hard when so often I just want to say “Fluff off” (you know what I really mean), and retreat to bed to eat chocolate (are you seeing a theme here?). I will try to sabotage relationships and not make effort, when relationships are exactly what I need to help me out of the trough.

When in a trough, my capacity for empathy, and therefore, a positive response to a situation, is affected. It is either reduced or I am completely exhausted by the effort of maintaining ‘the nice mask’. When in a ‘down’ phase, it’s really hard to give two hoots about other people’s problems. Understanding and discussing this is important – it means I can take steps to improve my mental health and prevent the severity of the depression. Not just better for me, but also for those around me.

Good mental health means we are more able to manage stress. Lazarus and Folkman have developed a transactional model of stress.⁵ They believe stress occurs when there is an imbalance between demand and resource. When demand exceeds resource we become stressed. But, they discovered that our interpretation is more important than actual facts. How we subjectively assess the stressful event or situation, and our abilities for coping with it are of more importance. This ties in with CBT beliefs – that everything is our interpretation. Stress is about our perception of the demand, our ability to cope, and what the consequences of being unable to meet the demand will be. We can get stuck in ruminative negative thinking – another common factor in mental health issues. If we have positive mental health and well-being, we are less likely to have negative thoughts about our capacity to meet demand, and the negative consequences if we don’t meet demand.

Stress is also important because when we are very stressed, we are more likely to personalise people’s behaviour towards us. We are more likely to believe someone is doing something on purpose to annoy us. When we are late, we become angrier at traffic jams and are likely to gesticulate or swear at someone (a daily occurrence for some). The most annoying pupil will always be more annoying when we are tired, and we can think they are surely doing it on purpose to ‘wind us up’. Believing a person is doing something on purpose will affect our reaction to it. Dagnan, Hull and McDonnell identified the controllability beliefs scale⁶ where judgements of responsibility predict our emotional response to an action. If we believe a person is doing an action on purpose, we are less likely to have a sympathetic response. Having a less sympathetic response means a situation is more likely to escalate in a negative way. If we believe the person isn’t doing it purposely, that it’s part of their condition or they are communicating something to us, we are more likely to have a sympathetic response and a more positive outcome.

By being more stressed, and personalising others’ behaviour, we are more likely to have a confrontational response to a situation. This will, in many situations, escalate to a negative outcome that could have been avoided. We’ve all had those conversations where we escalate up and up and end up with nowhere to go. “Well, if you are late again you will end up being expelled from every setting in the whole world, for ever”. I do it with my children: “If you don’t clear that up then this will happen”. They argue back, and I get angrier and escalate the consequences to impossible scenarios: “You are grounded for 35 years and I am taking everything out of your bedroom”. I then walk away thinking “How the hell am I going to follow through on that? I wish I handled that differently”. A sympathetic response is less likely to escalate and more likely to have a more positive outcome.

Modelling

AKA The “Do as I say, not as I do” mentality doesn’t work

Our biggest influence on pupils is what and who we are – that is, through modelling. Our mental health and well-being is important to that modelling. We have to understand and openly discuss mental health and well-being to model that to pupils to reduce stigma. I had a conversation once with my daughters about why they only see the negative things about themselves when looking in a mirror. They said “You do too, Mum”. And they were right – which obviously I hated them for, as no one wants their children to be right! But it made me realise how important modelling is. They had learned many of their behaviours from me. So now I remark how fabulous I look when I look in a mirror (and I do, obviously).

When training I often ask staff “Are you nice to each other? Are you nice to all your pupils? Do you have a competitive environment amongst staff?” This competitive toxic environment will be modelled by the pupils. A Hughes, Calle and Wilson (2001)⁷ study showed that classmates make inferences on other attributes and likeability based in part on observations of teacher interactions. Gest and Rodkin⁸ showed that teachers who showed a high level of emotional support to all pupils had classrooms with more reciprocated friendships. We are going to see later how important friendships are to mental health, but here’s a clue – IT’S MASSIVE.

If we have positive mental health and well-being, we are more likely to be nicer to pupils who in turn will be nicer to each other.

Our influence and impact via modelling are further verified in a meta-analysis by Sanchez, Cornacchio et al.⁹ They found that “[c]onsidering serious barriers precluding youth from accessing necessary mental health care, … child psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are wise to recognize the important role that school personnel, who are naturally in children’s lives, can play in decreasing child mental health problems”.

Are you a positive model or a negative model for your pupils? Are you emotionally regulated? Do you demonstrate effective self-regulation of your emotions?

Being an emotionally regulated role model is vital in supporting mental health. Hauser, Allen & Golden (2006)¹⁰ found that teenagers who had committed violent crimes and developed insight and self-awareness, went on to do well, and that a major part of this had to do with capacities developed through talking with adults who modelled psychological thinking. Now, I am not saying we should start working with deeply traumatised and violent teenagers, but that by being good self-regulated role models we have a major influence on the mental health and well-being of our pupils. Teachers who regularly lose their temper and shout are not modelling self-regulated behaviour – this will be discussed further in a later chapter.

Emotional literacy

AKA Understanding how and why we don’t all think the same

Part of having good mental health and well-being ourselves is about having good emotional literacy. By this I mean a good understanding of how we think and how other people think, why people may feel as they do, what can affect this and how it can be supported, how we work and how pupils work. Most importantly, we must understand we are all different with different perceptions and different emotions. It’s important that we know enough never to say “Well, I went through worse and I was OK, so get on with it”.

So often I hear that mental health training isn’t a priority, or mental health training for staff is optional, not compulsory. “We only have a certain amount of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) time, and we have higher priorities”. This is very short-sighted, as mental well-being underpins ever...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Staff mental health and well-being
• 2 Self-esteem
• 3 Bullying
• 4 Pupil experience
• 5 Positive motivation
• 6 Behaviour systems
• 7 Working with parents
• 8 From the top down
• 9 Checklist