Setting Up a Support Network for Senior Mental Health Leads

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 2023, I decided to start up a Senior Mental Health Lead’s Support Network in my area. In this series of 6 blogs, I 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. 

In the last blog, I wrote about “the magic in the room”. How getting together and supporting each other is absolutely vital in this role. This time I am going to share how I keep the group useful and relevant.

So perhaps you have read my other blogs and are thinking that I have overcome all my difficulties. Now that the group is up and running, it does feel a little less stressful. At least I am no longer waking up in the night worrying that nobody will come!

However, I do want to keep the group useful and relevant so as well as the networking part, I have also tried to bring in external speakers and guests to talk about things that may help us. If you are thinking of starting a group, perhaps some of these ideas may be useful to you and I am sure that you will have others. Please do share them with me and perhaps we can talk about them in a future blog.

At our first meeting, we found that a lot of the group were struggling to get their referrals accepted. To combat this, I invited our PMHW (Healthy Young Minds :: Primary Mental Health Workers (healthyyoungmindslsc.co.uk) team to come in and do a presentation for us. They were very happy to support us because, of course, it helps them if the referral is complete and relevant. The session was very well received and our group found that not only were our referrals better quality, but we also understood better the challenges also faced by the PMHW team and were able to improve relationships between us all as a direct result. This has been a very happy result of our relationships with our speakers; it’s definitely much easier to have a conversation with someone if you’ve met them already.

Our next speaker was from our EMHP team (Education mental health practitioner | Health Careers) Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: agreenpaper - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). If you are lucky enough to have a team in your area, I really recommend linking up with them. We refer many of our children to them and have brilliantly successful outcomes. They can also come in and do assemblies, workshops and offer support to parents. They really are fantastic. For our session, the service lead came in to talk to us about a whole school audit. If you have an EMHP team attached to your school, they may offer an audit with you. If not, there are a few online that you might find useful (such as the one here: Implementing the whole school approach: audit tool and action plan : Mentally Healthy Schools). Personally, I really like a framework to refer to, so I found this tool very supportive.

I wanted to finish this month’s blog by going back to why I started the network in the first place. I wanted it to be a place of support and connections.

There are people at all different stages of their journeys and we come together to offer friendship and a listening ear. Bringing in representatives from our local commissioned groups has helped us to understand their roles more and for them to understand us. These connections allow us to offer a better experience for the young people in all our settings.

This is the reason we do what we do!