A few years ago, I was privileged to sit in on a training session for Samaritans volunteers, as research for an article I was writing. In the unlikely event that you’re unfamiliar with the work of the Samaritans, they provide a 24-hour confidential helpline, allowing volunteers to listen without judgment to anything that members of the public might want to get off their chest.

It’s demanding work for the volunteers, who do not give direct advice, but instead are trained to ask the correct open questions to guide the callers to talk themselves out of their emotional darkness and into the potential light of a solution. Statistically, one in five callers to the helpline will be having suicidal thoughts, although topics of conversation vary wildly.

Least helpful

During the training, we were asked to imagine we were walking along a road and came upon a person trapped in a deep hole, crying for help. “What might you do to help that person?” our trainer asked. We responded that we might first talk to them, to reassure them that we were there and that we would do everything we could to get them out and that they shouldn’t panic. We might then call the emergency services, or scour the area for anything that might be used to pull them out.

“Good,” our trainer responded. “And what would be the least helpful thing you could do?” We were all quite confident we knew the answer to that one. “Walk past and ignore them,” we chorused, smugly, in unison.

“Well, no, actually,” he said. “That’s not the least helpful thing. The most unhelpful thing you could do would be to jump down into the hole with them. Then there’s just two of you in a hole, needing help.”

Visibly breaking

I think of that evening every time I’m with a teacher who is visibly breaking under the strain of trying to provide mental health care to his or her pupils with no training or budget, or when a teenager approaches me after class, crying and shaking, to tell me how worried they are about their friend who is self-harming. Wherever there is a person languishing within the clutches of mental illness, there is always a danger that their friends, family and care-givers will climb into their private hell and be sucked into their emotional hole.

In 2016, the DfE is prioritising peer-to-peer mentoring in its drive to improve the mental health of young people. They’ve launched an open call for evidence from schools which have implemented successful peer-mentoring schemes, as well as holding a succession of workshops and steering groups in an attempt to define best practice and provide recommendations for British schools.

The potential benefits of peer-to-peer support cannot be over-emphasised. It is one of the few interventions which has been consistently and regularly shown to reduce mental-illness recovery time. There are also schools throughout the UK, like Magna Carta in Staines and The Sandon School in Chelmsford, which have been operating an effective peer-support system for years, and have thereby succeeded in creating a wellbeing-conducive environment. From the point of view of cost and general effectiveness, a focus on peer-to-peer support is quite clearly the way to go.

Mentoring the mentors

However, my priority as part of the discussions happening at government level will be to develop strategies for protecting the wellbeing of the mentors, not just the mentees.

Teachers are, of course, often providing a mentoring role. I want to assure all TES readers that it’s been impossible to shut me up on the importance of looking after the mental health of education professionals when discussions are being had at government level. I’ve also requested that this will be noted in the forthcoming recommendations published by the Institute for Public Policy Research.

As for younger mentors, the key is giving them an appropriate amount of supervision, limiting what is expected of them as well as extending to them permission to prioritise their own emotional health if the process becomes overwhelming.

I asked Martin Seagar, who is a senior consultant for the Samaritans, has worked within the NHS for 30 years and who is, incidentally, a total legend, to summarise his recommendations for looking after young peer mentors. Here are his answers:  

1. Mentors need quiet time for reflection and relaxation after mentoring sessions, to allow for processing of emotional impact.
2. Mentors should have their own supervisor/supporter/mentor to discuss and process difficult conversations.
3. Each mentor should have a limited number of mentees, so that the mind is not overloaded.
4. If the needs of their mentees are complex and intense, their total number of mentees should be further reduced to compensate for this.

Incidentally, The Sandon School, whose peer programme has now been running for more than a decade, have done exactly this. They host biweekly sessions where mentors come together under supervision of a member of staff to discuss concerns and generally offload. This is without doubt one of the primary reasons for the effectiveness of their approach.

Incorporating a need to safeguard the wellbeing of peer supporters, teachers and other school workers is, in my opinion, the key to the success of the government’s mental health initiatives in schools.

Natasha Devon is the Department for Education’s mental health champion. She tweets at @natashadevonMBE

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