College’s mental health strategy covers all bases

The introduction of a comprehensive staff training programme and a raft of measures to tackle wellbeing issues has had a notably positive impact on staff and students at one FE college, say Joanne Green and Eileen Nicholson
17th April 2020, 12:02am
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College’s mental health strategy covers all bases

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archived/colleges-mental-health-strategy-covers-all-bases

Lucy is a student at Bolton College. She has suffered with anxiety and depression for many years, brought on by an adverse childhood experience (ACE). However, far from being alone in this or forced to seek help from external agencies, she is supported across the college in a raft of ways.

She sees the college counsellor weekly, attends a singing club on a Monday lunchtime and a colouring club every Wednesday, and has relaxation and mindfulness sessions regularly.

She speaks to her friend Sophie, who is a student wellbeing champion, when she’s feeling particularly low, and also leans on her personal tutor for support. Every teacher she works with is aware that she is vulnerable and many have received specialist ACE training.

And even if not in college, she can still be supported by talking with Ada, a chatbot that operates on Bolton College’s website, which can direct her to key websites if she needs help or advice.

This wide range of support services that Lucy can access - from trained individuals to creative clubs and digital solutions - are part of a joined-up wellbeing approach at Bolton College that we believe provides a clear model for tackling the mental health issues facing young learners.

After all, like most in the education sector, we have seen a massive increase of reported mental health issues.

Of course, this could be due to how the language around mental health has evolved in our society; learners are more willing to disclose to us than ever before. But, equally, as social media dominates our young people’s lives and they experience heightened pressure due to exams, it is not surprising that a third of all our safeguarding cases each year are linked to mental health.

So, how did we get to the level of support laid out above? We have had a mental health team at Bolton since 2012 but we started to ramp things up last year after we heard about a pilot happening in Harpurhey, Manchester (Joanne is an elected councillor on Manchester Council and Harpurhey is her ward).

In the pilot, staff in as many of the services as possible - for example, adult services, child services, the police and housing - were given ACE training, which taught them how to be trauma informed at work.

Joanne came back to the college, inspired by what she had witnessed, and asked college principal Bill Webster if staff could receive the training with a view to the whole college becoming trauma informed.

He agreed and tasked Joanne with using this as the starting point for a new wellbeing strategy for the college. As luck would have it, this coincided with the Association of Colleges announcing that it had a £300,000 pot of money (granted from the NHS) for Greater Manchester colleges to bid for in order to deliver different initiatives on mental health. She applied for £10,000 to deliver the ACE training and was successful.

So, in September 2019, we started delivering the ACE training, as well as streamlining and refining the other initiatives we had around mental health and wellbeing into a single point of management to help ensure everything was working in harmony.

The whole-college approach includes a huge variety of initiatives, such as:

Wellbeing strategy

Overseeing everything is our wellbeing strategy for 2020-21, which is available for all staff and students to read. In this, we set out what the college is doing for leadership, transition, promoting wellbeing, supporting learners, learner voice and partnerships - and what we plan to do next.

Mental health first-aid training

We have 50 staff trained as mental health first aiders to ensure that conversations about mental health can happen at all levels in college. The training gives staff the confidence to know that if a student does disclose to them, they know what to say and how they can help. Sometimes, it’s simply about being a listening ear. All staff who have received this training are given a special lanyard so that they are easily identified.

ACE training

An adverse childhood experience sits with you mentally and physiologically. We know that we won’t be able to cure our students, but providing staff with the knowledge and skills to spot any signs, and then help young people who are presenting with issues, is key. Our aim is that, by 2021, all staff have attended the training in support of our ambition to be a truly trauma-informed organisation. The decision to make this essential training for all staff is an important indicator of the college’s commitment, and more than 200 staff have attended so far.

Cross-college meetings

We have four key teams: counselling, mental health, personal tutors and safeguarding. Every month, the leaders of these teams meet to discuss individual high-risk cases. We do this to make sure the staff are all OK and to make sure that there is the right support in place for that student. We ask questions such as: is it working? Is it not working? Shall we increase support?

Self-assessment

Every student aged between 16 and 18 takes a psychometric wellbeing self-assessment when they start college. It asks questions such as, “How would you feel entering a classroom for the first time where you knew no one?” This means that even if a student does not self-disclose, we are aware if they are prone to anxiety and mental ill health.

Enrichment

All our enrichment activities for students are based around the NHS’ five steps for wellbeing: connect with other people; be physically active; learn new skills; give to others; and pay attention to the present moment. As a result, we run several weekly clubs, including colouring, singing, boardgames and video games, which are all open to both staff and students. We also run targeted sessions for vulnerable students on aspects such as reflexology, sleeping techniques, eating for wellbeing and relaxation techniques.

Student champions

We have recruited 15 student wellbeing champions, who went through an extensive application process and will receive training on how to carry out these roles as best as possible. This includes asking them to look at our various policies, such as the fitness to study policy and our behaviour for success policy, and to provide feedback on how they could be improved.

Ada

Our chatbot Ada provides students with 24/7 support and advice. Ada is custom-built by our brilliant Information Learning Technology team, headed up by strategic lead for ILT Aftab Hussain. If a student is at home, they can ask Ada a question. For example, if a student asks who they can speak to about their mental health, Ada will direct them to various helplines and also send an automatic message to the wellbeing team to signpost that student’s concerns to staff.

This range of services that we offer, and our implementation of them, has received widespread support from staff, students, parents and carers.

This is not to say that there weren’t some challenges, too. For example, with regard to the trauma-informed training, staff were initially worried that problems that they were not able to handle would become more commonplace.

However, once they had attended the training, they could see that what was expected of them was reasonable and achievable. They now have an understanding that trauma is common; they recognise that a student’s behaviour is a way of them communicating their feelings; they realise the importance of not asking “What’s wrong with you?” but instead “What’s happening for you?”, and of being kind not only to others but to yourself. All these lessons are easy to adapt into their everyday working life and their interactions with learners.

While we are confident that our approach is having a positive impact on pupils, it is not quick or simple to measure the impact that all this has had on staff and students.

However, we should have data on how the trauma-informed approach has affected the college by the end of the year and we will use this to help further inform how we develop our approach and adapt any areas where improvements could be made.

We do already have some plans in the pipeline, though - which are outlined in our strategy - such as hosting a weekly programme of events aimed at developing resilience and wellbeing in learners. We will also move the focus to prevention by ensuring that staff are signposting learners to services such as counselling and anger management as problems are identified.

We’d recommend this approach to any college looking to bring in something similar. But it is vital that the introduction of such measures gains full support from the college principal and senior leadership team: for a whole-college approach to work, it must have buy-in from the very top.

Joanne Green is director of quality at Bolton College. Eileen Nicholson is Bolton College’s student services manager

This article originally appeared in the 17 April 2020 issue under the headline “Joined-up mental health strategy covers all the bases”

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