Why EVERY professional can support children’s mental health

• 27 August 2017
• Jane Evans
• no comments

I love debates on Twitter. Although with just 140 characters to use they can get VERY frustrating! Recently I was having a Twitter debate on enabling teachers to be trained as mental health specialists. It came from an article in the Guardian,

New ‘Teach First’ to train teachers as mental health specialists

UK charity aims to recruit and develop teachers specially to help vulnerable pupils at risk of exclusion

Some strong feelings were expressed on how realistic is it to expect teachers to pick up possible signs of mental illness. Other concerns were:

• Will children be kept safe
• Specialists need to be in schools for this
• Aren’t mental health specialists, social workers, educational psychologists better qualified to assess and intervene
• It’s not the role of a teacher

As with everything mainstream being done ‘to’ children it often seems to be:

• Down the crisis end
• Not underpinned by a basic understanding of attachment and trauma needs
• About attainment
• Random and driven by ‘trends’ e.g. mindfulness

Let’s steady the horses and keep it simple!

As soon as ‘mental health’ is mentioned, especially children’s, everyone goes from a stroll to a gallop! There’s a crisis. Services are non-existent. Children are suffering. Rates are rising. I would invite a more grounded look at it all without the galloping. These statements are true but if we strip things back maybe we can be of more use to every child?

Teachers and early year’s practitioners spend hours with children

These dedicated professionals are with children’s mental and physical health needs for 6 or more hours a day. Therefore, it makes sense that they should be highly trained in knowing how to help keep EVERY child mentally and physically regulated and to recognize signs of a struggle and possible illness.

Every adult who spends time with children, and potentially makes life-changing decisions about them, has very real opportunities to do something to help. They need to do so with a foundation of understanding signs of stress, high anxiety, and trauma. They also deserve to have a basic set of tools which help regulate children’s body systems whilst paying attention to possible trauma.

The body keeps the score

Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal book on how trauma shows up in the body is a must when it comes to understanding mental and physical wellness. As is the work of Pat Ogden, Peter Levine and many, many more.

Professionals need to know how to spot from the way a child stands, sits, moves reacts to transitions, their  arrival, departures, meal times, break times, class situations whether it is ‘unusual.’ Individuals and setting that remain stuck in the old ‘behaviourist’ view of challenging behaviours, behaviour management, and modification fail the children.

Chuck in some mindfulness?

Popular in some settings is improving mental health by the use of mindfulness, yoga, meditation and other similar interventions. I’m not opposed to these BUT one-size does not fit all! Professionals need to understand why they are doing what they are doing. Also, how a child’s trauma can be triggered by being still and breathing slowly in and out.

What has changed?

Professionals have ALWAYS been dealing with early signs of stress, anxiety, and trauma. However, many have not had any insight into what lies behind mental ill-health. Now children’s distress can be medicalized and given a label, ADHD, OCD, ADD, ‘on the spectrum’ the list goes on.

Current basic training equips professionals for their and the children’s mental wellness, in the same way, an umbrella would work in the eye of a tornado. After all, even if children are given treatment or medicated or spend time in an Alternative Provision (some of which are not trauma-aware either) they will often return to mainstream education.

Professionals must be trauma-educated

We fail our children, we fail the professionals if there continues to be lack of robust ongoing training on what causes, increases and most importantly HELPS children who are mentally distressed and overwhelmed. I deliver a great deal of training in early years and schools, it’s nearly always a day’s worth. Sometimes this increases established understanding, other times it’s just another development day and the ongoing work to embed it falls foul of the immense pressures to perform.

School exclusions happen more for children who are mentally unwell or I would say, who have early trauma in their history:

Under the current failing system, excluded pupils are four times more likely to grow up in poverty, twice as likely to be living in care, and seven times more likely to have a special educational need as other children.

This lack of specialized support then leads to a downward spiral of underachievement, the study says, adding that:

Teachers in schools for excluded pupils are twice as likely to have no educational qualifications.

99 per cent of excluded children will finish school without five good GCSEs required by most employers.

These marginalized young people are often then in a pipeline to prison: of the 85,975 people in UK prison, IPPR estimates 54,164 were excluded when at school.

Source: Institute for Public Policy Research

Sadly it’s, hard to steady the horses long enough to convince everyone that daily interventions improve mental and physical well-being and therefore results. Also, that this must begin with a very real ‘for ever’ focus on staff regulation and well-being or it will fade into the background again.

Is education policy fit for purpose?

Policy remains focused on results, results, results. Theresa May offers incongruent platitudes about investment in mental health whilst ignoring the bucket loads of robust research into what really keeps children mentally well in the first place!

If EVERY early year’s profession knew as much about what causes early trauma (not the big trauma but the small) and how it appears. If every teaching professional knew what to do to reduce a child’s anxiety, it would change everything.

Will a Master’s Degree be the answer?

Even if a Master’s Degree for teachers in mental health and education as proposed by IPPR is created. Unless this includes real insight into the neuroscience of trauma in all areas, it will not be enough:

In September, IPPR’s report on the subject will be published, setting out details of a new pathway into teaching which includes a Master’s degree in mental health and education, to address the crisis.

Source: Institute for Public Policy Research

The knowledge exists

The travesty is much of what is done is reactive and crisis-driven and not built from the foundations up. Early years practitioners and teaching staff are there every day so let’s make it normal to know about how to improve children’s core body and brain regulation and not a ‘specialism.’

Some children will most definitely need extra support, tools, therapies, and ways to keep them safe. There will always be a need for experts but frontline staff can do so much if they do it intentionally and are robustly supported.

If intervention continues to be down the ‘sharp end’ with identification and signposting seen as the only option, then children will increasingly become mentally unwell. They will also get a sense of otherness, they can’t cope with me, and this is just what I am.

More than ever I firmly believe that it does not have to be this way.

“Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile.” Abu Baker

As you can see it’s a bit too long for a tweet!!

To learn more – book one of my Understanding Early Childhood Trauma Masterclasses and come away feeling more confident, with additional insight and tools.

Bristol 12th September

Birmingham 18th September

London 6th October – in partnership with Clinical Psychologist and leading trauma expert, Dr. Karen Treisman.