Mental health is climbing inexorably up the agenda in schools. While I don’t subscribe to the view that we’re facing a national crisis, we must all be concerned both about the prevalence of depression, self-harm and other forms of mental illness among the young and the inadequacy of health services to help deal with them.
The average wait for troubled (I use that anodyne word loosely) teenagers to access support from the child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) ranged from 14 days to 200 days. If such youngsters then, understandably, fail to attend that delayed first appointment, they are frequently discharged without notice or query.
All this suggests that society as a whole is failing to take this pressing and genuinely medical problem seriously.
Schools are working hard to train their staff, rendering them both better equipped and more confident in recognising and dealing with pupils’ mental health issues. But they also know that they must work on the positive flipside, the active promotion of wellbeing and resilience among children and adults alike.
As in all fields of medicine, prevention of illness is as important as finding the cure when it occurs. Thus wellbeing, the classic mens sana in corpore sano (healthy mind in healthy body), goes hand in hand with resilience.
In schools we want - in the words of the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust’s associate trainer Dick Moore - to help our young people to be able to “dance in the rain” - or, in one of Dick’s more graphic metaphors, to bend in the wind, rather than snap in the hurricane.
Schools have moved a long way: they need to go still further.
One of the leading figures in the promotion of wellbeing in schools, when he was master of Wellington College, was my friend Sir Anthony Seldon. Now vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, he continues to advocate its vital centrality. To ensure that wellbeing really does lie at the heart of schools’ work and purpose, he now recommends that Ofsted make it a major strand of the inspection process. At that point I part company with him.
‘Ofsted isn’t the answer’
His suggestion was discussed at a gathering of mental health and education professionals this week, dealing with precisely those coupled themes of children’s mental health and wellbeing. As I snorted my opposition to the suggestion, a good proportion of those present felt that the specific inclusion of wellbeing in the inspection process would indeed help to push it up the agenda for all schools.
One colleague supporting Sir Anthony’s proposal added the caveat that the inspection process would have to change to become more a mechanism for sharing best practice than an enforcer. She admitted that, given Ofsted’s current role and modus operandi, it was a little hard to envisage.
That is, of course, why I am strongly opposed to the idea. The process of inspection demands that its subject be quantified and summarised in order that a judgment can be made. There is thus a danger that schools, under pressure as always, will see the task of satisfying Ofsted’s demands as yet another box-ticking exercise, distracting them from the real work of spreading wellbeing.
Wellbeing tangles with questions of ethos, care, feelings, emotions and relationships: I cannot see how any measurable indicators could be devised that would actually improve practice in this area or in any way accurately reflect what is really happening in terms of children’s wellbeing in school.
Given the power (and potent threat) of an Ofsted inspection, it would be unreasonable to permit merely subjective judgments to be made, published and acted upon. I don’t believe wellbeing is measurable: any attempt at constructing statistical measures would inevitably be misleading - and lead to box-ticking, thus completing the vicious circle.
This country has become brainwashed over the years into thinking that schools and teachers must be held accountable exclusively through data, inspection and league tables. Valuing only what is measurable, we convince ourselves that change must be achieved (or enforced) by building the required outcome into inspection criteria.
We do indeed need to move wellbeing up the agenda for schools: inspection would be entirely the wrong way to go about it.
Dr Bernard Trafford is headteacher of Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne, and a former chairman of the HMC. The views expressed here are personal. He tweets as @bernardtrafford
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