Advice from AMHIE
You may have noticed or read a BBC article released today called Mental health: Children should be more resilient, say experts – BBC News.
This article’s headline is misleading and implies that children are at fault for not being resilient and that all or most experts say this. The article itself provides different viewpoints on the decline in children’s mental health over the last few years.
Here we wanted to summarise the points and also give you some advice about things you can do to support children’s mental health in response to some of the issues raised in this article.
Poor mental health vs. mental health difficulties
We all experience poor mental health, it might a down day, it might be a low mood, it might be grief or worry about something. These experiences are normal and are transient, they pass with time and talking and coping. What helps people cope and avoid these times becoming overwhelming is resilience (the ability to overcome adversity when needed).
Mental health difficulties are different. These are problems that require some form of support, medication and may even lead to diagnosis of a mental health disorder.
Strategies
One of the biggest things that people in education can do is to help people to understand the difference. This affects the way we talk about what someone is experiencing and also how it is viewed.
If we are supporting someone through a period of poor mental health, then we are affectively supporting them through a time when they need it and that is a transient period so you can talk about the period as a time-bound period (in fact it can even help to map out how long they think it will last).
The words and phrases we use should differentiate between poor mental health and mental health difficulties. Staff should know the difference between the two phrases. PSHE lessons should help pupils learn the difference between the two states and when they should seek help (plus also the effectiveness of treatment) – known as mental health literacy.
Increasing levels of poor mental health
There can be no doubt that poor mental health has increased over the last few years. Part of this may be to do with the pandemic effect, more emphasis on mental health (what we look for is what we see), more awareness, or for other reasons. A crisis is a time where there is an intense period of difficulty or danger.
Strategies
Helping all staff to recognise the symptoms of poor mental health can provide opportunities for early conversations that can help avoid poor mental health becoming a mental health difficulty.
Think about how you are monitoring whole-setting need, for example the number of pupils in each year group who are experiencing difficulties and those who require interventions. This should give you a trend over time to see the pattern of those requiring support, those referred and the lower level difficulties. For primary school tracking you might like to use something like the tracker at https://amhie.com/learn/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/Whole-school-mental-health-reporter-primary.xlsx, or for secondary https://amhie.com/learn/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/Whole-school-mental-health-reporter-secondary.xlsx.
Having information accessible to staff and parents on local wellbeing and mental health support services, charities and other opportunities can help people access support for pupils experiencing poor mental health. Some settings do this as part of their newsletter, others have an area of their website devoted to it. For an example, please see Notre Dame College’s Wellbeing Hub https://www.notredamecoll.ac.uk/ndhub
Resilience
Here we need to consider organisational resilience and individual resilience of both staff and pupils.
Organisational resilience can relate to the staff levels, the staffs level of training, the culture within an organisation amongst other factors.
Individual staff resilience could relate to how well they are prepared to deal with what they are facing, how well they are able to problem solve, how much they know about the situations they will face and also how to emotionally regulate and distract themselves from any intense emotions at the time.
For children and young people PSHE content should help them to learn about their emotions, how to cope with what they face and be resilient to future events in their lives.
Strategies
Review the PSHE Curriculum with preparation for the next stage of a pupil’s life in mind. Is the curriculum giving opportunities to teach the pupils the skills that they will need to cope with the next stage (such as transition to the next educational phase)?
Support curriculum leads and teacher planning to provide natural opportunities to discuss the use of wellbeing activities to increase resilience. For example expression of emotions through art or music as a way of coping with challenging situations, or the use of puzzles to engage the brain in a different way.
Richard Daniel Curtis, Chair.
8/1/2025