Setting Up a Mental Health Support Network for Schools: A Guide by Kerry Bridges

Kerry Bridges has been the Mental Health and Wellbeing Lead at Archbishop Temple Church of England High School in Preston, Lancashire since 2021 but part of the Pastoral and Safeguarding Teams for a great deal longer. She is happy to talk about supporting wellbeing in schools all day long and has a particular interest in staff wellbeing.

In my last series of blogs, I wrote about setting up a Senior Mental Health Lead’s Support Network in my area. I hope that if you read those blogs you found something in them to support you in your role. In this series of 4 blogs, I will talk about one of the things we do in school to support our children’s wellbeing in the hope that there is something here you can use or adapt. Again, if you do so, please let me know. I love to hear how creative and inspiring our community are.

When I first started teaching in 1996, we really did not talk about wellbeing in school. I initially worked at a wonderful school in Nottinghamshire but the area was a mining area and there were few jobs. Our children had little to inspire them (unemployment in the area was running high at the time as a result of mine closures What happened to the Nottinghamshire coal mines? - Nottinghamshire Live (nottinghampost.com) ). Still, they were expected to come into school and it was our job to teach them Maths and English. We rarely talked about what life would be like for them when they left, because honestly we just didn’t know.

Thank goodness things are very different now and schools are places where we support children with skills for life. Mental health is high on the agenda and looking after our wellbeing is something that we talk about all the time.

As always, there are two sides to every coin. As we look for resources to support us in our work, so there are many companies creating an offer for schools to take advantage of. Here, my advice would be to look very carefully at their credentials. There is no necessity for people working in the area to be qualified in any way and, although this does not mean they aren’t excellent at what they do, it also makes it very difficult to know how appropriate their offers might be. At our school, we are careful to try and use commissioned services or those recommended by mental health professionals in our area. If you are in any doubt, I would urge you to do the same.

Against this backdrop, our Deputy Head asked me if I would run a Mental Health Drop Down day for the whole school. Of course, I immediately said “yes”. What an excellent opportunity to introduce our children to wellbeing practices that they could embed into their day to day lives. I felt excited that there was so much we could do.

As with all amazing opportunities, I sat down to plan the day and the reality of what needed to be done hit me. I needed something that would work for 750 11 year olds, 16 year olds and everyone else in between. It was important to me that in teaching our children about wellbeing, we were not compromising that of the adults in school who were supporting them.

We would not be setting a very good example if we did that. This was perhaps going to be a bigger job than I had first envisaged!