The theme of 2022's World Mental Health Day, set by the World Federation for Mental Health, is 'Make mental health and wellbeing for all a global priority'.
Here at Future Action we are absolutely committed to this vision for the world and are on hand to support schools achieve this.
A potential solution One way we can make mental health and well-being a global priority for all is by improving the support and training for teachers in schools across the world.
We know that mental health challenges for young people have increased significantly in the last decade due to the rise of social media and the impact of lockdown from COVID-19.
In March 2022 alone over 90,000 young people in England were referred to mental health support services. This is the equivalent of a full Wembley Stadium of young people all struggling in just one month across our country.
With emerging technologies we can now upscale our teachers on a rapid scale through online pre-recorded teacher training courses. Norfolk County Council have been setting the pace with our RISE Up programme, which has already had over 270 teachers sign up for the CPD course in partnership with us and we are now supporting 62 Norfolk schools both secondary and special schools.
The programme guides busy teachers how to reduce students' anxiety, build their confidence and create sustainable early intervention mental well-being programmes within 90 days.
The programme has two key aims. The first is to identify those students who are struggling as early as possible and refer them to specialist internal support through internal school counsellors, mental health support teams or safeguarding.
The second aim is to give all young people and their teachers a toolbox of self-care strategies so that they can prioritise and own their mental well-being rather than waiting for problems to arise before being giving effective strategies.
As busy teachers on the front line of this crisis, we are not trying or trained to diagnose young people but we can identify those who are struggling as early as possible and direct them to special support so that they can get the help they need and make a quicker recovery.
We know how busy you hero teachers are so we are on a mission to make life as easy as possible for you.
Our programme is pre-recorded and online so teachers can access the course content any time that suits their busy lives. We have an accompanying full range of editable resources so that you can adapt them to meet the needs of the young people and save you hours of precious planning time in the process.
The Impact
We are currently in over 100 schools across the world who have committed to making mental health and wellbeing a priority in their settings.
We have been blown away with the 5 star reviews and great feedback from teachers and students that have implemented the programme in their own unique ways in their schools. Here is one of our latest testimonials.
Nick Austin, Head of PE at Hethersett Academy said:
“The content is so appropriate to the needs of young people today."
To see a wider range of testimonials please click here.
Whenever people like to create global change, it always starts with taking action at home, so on this World Mental Health day we are laying down a challenge to you:
What are you going to do to make mental health and well-being a global priority?
How we can help you If you want to take action an make mental health and well-being a priority then we have got a range of taster resources to help you.
We have got a scorecard so you can evaluate your current early intervention well-being provision within 3 minutes,
Taster online teacher training courses so that you can help your school become more proactive in identifying those students who are struggling as early as possible,
case studies to provide inspiration of how other schools have gone about boosting the mental well-being of the young people,
as well as a series of blogs on current well-being issues in schools.
We look forward to hearing from you.