She is happy to talk about supporting wellbeing in schools all day long and has a particular interest in staff wellbeing.

In 2023, I decided to start up a Senior Mental Health Lead’s Support Network in my area. In this series of 6 blogs, I will talk about why I wanted to do that (and how it didn’t always go to plan) in the hope that it will give you some inspiration if you would like to do something similar. 

If you do and would like some support or to share your journey, please feel free to get in touch with me. I would love to hear your stories.

Having been a member and then leader in the Pastoral team in school for the past 15 years, I was very excited to see the green paper on Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision in 2017.

I spoke to my line manager and Head Teacher and we all decided that I would be the best person to take on the new Designated Mental Health Lead role. I was sent the information about the training and completed my Certificate in Child and Adolescent Mental Health training with Trauma Informed Schools UK in January 2022. I was all ready to make an impact on my school and our community. My Head Teacher is absolutely brilliant and supports whatever is right for our children. I couldn’t wait to get stuck in.

I am sure this will resonate with a lot of you reading this blog. There were some amazing people that I met when I was doing my training. I saw some brilliant ideas of what schools were offering and what could be done. It was fantastic to be with like minded people who were facing the same day to day concerns as me and to share ideas and good practice. Some of them may well have been you.

When I came back into school though, I started to feel that I was on my own. Although everyone could see the value of what I was doing and wanted to support me, they weren’t aware of the work that I was doing on a day to day basis and I didn’t have that sense of community and belonging that I had had on my training. There was nobody to say, “that’s good, but this would be even better” or “have you thought about this way of doing things?”

Government guidance for Employers (Employers and Loneliness, pub. May 2021) draws on research around the negative effects on loneliness in the workplace (lower wellbeing and productivity costing employers £665 million in 2021 for example). Even researching that statistic brought home to me how many people must feel the same, and schools are no different to any other employers.

I wanted to come up with a creative solution that would support me going forwards but I also really wanted to find other people in the same position. I knew that they were probably feeling exactly the same and we could perhaps work together. Our Primary Mental Health Team were setting up a Mental Health Champions session to bring together local offers and end users to showcase what is available in our area. I started to think that I might be able to do something similar but specifically for education.