Extending current systems and practices, including external agencies

Half of the interviewees talked about extending current systems and practices, to include auditing outside professionals who are already involved, extending the Learning for Life and Work (LLW) element of the curriculum and including pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing in the curriculum as well as making it part of the inspection process:

The system for working with those vulnerable adults doesn’t work and needs to be recognised by the politicians and that’s where they need to do an audit among the health workers and all of those to say how are we going to get this right?

(Principal)

So audit all the different professionals to find out what do we need to be able to work with young people to address these issues?

(Principal) So we offer Learning for Life and Work, it’s a compulsory GCSE and it’s an area in which all of these things can fit. In many ways you are talking about your role as a citizen, your role as a student, your role as an employee and of course emotional wellbeing is key to all that. I like that area because it focuses kids and teachers. On the one hand I’m saying don’t make it over technical, on the other hand I’m saying I like Life and Work because it’s all in a package but you have a timetable time and kids will pay attention to it because there’s a large coursework element to it. That would seem to me to have potential for expansion but I can’t give that as much time as I want.

(Principal) I suppose as part of the inspection process in schools, child protection is up there and every once and a while the inspection will look at different themes, you know healthy eating but will they look specifically at this area? If they value that then that’s something that they should be looking for in the schools to see what schools are doing there in terms of pupils’

emotional health and wellbeing.

(Vice Principal) Several interviewees talked about the importance of looking carefully at and evaluating the use of outside professionals and agencies both in terms of making recommendations and in terms of talking about the current activities that take place in their schools. As well as this, some respondents called for greater use of some external agencies and more interaction between them and with the schools:

I think much more liaison between Educational Psychologists and doctors.

(Principal) You know society changes at an alarming rate, young folk are exposed to a wider vocabulary and wider issues just through their own research and so on. Does that sort of information always match their experience? And are there any support mechanisms there where you can maybe tie those two together? I think teachers are asked in many, many cases to diagnose and you can see that just through your professional experience. When it actually comes to deal with the issues then other professionals need to come in and I don’t think you’d ever say you have enough. If we’ve failed one young person, you know we’ve failed one too many. So more interaction with outside professionals and a willingness to come in and take some of those personal development classes.

(Principal)

I don’t think you can have enough trained counsellors and obviously if there are more you feel that with emotional health it would be more preventative rather than reactive.

(Principal) Then you get down to some of the issues and teenage pregnancy offers a whole range, bereavement is a whole big area. Certainly it’s there but you never have enough folks. I don’t think any principal would say they’re covered. As I say one young person emotionally deprived of services is one too many.

(Principal) 4.10.4 Teacher training and recruitment

The area of teacher training and recruitment was frequently referred to during discussions about recommendations for improving pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing. Interviewees talked about the type of people who are recruited to teaching, the qualifications required as well as how continuing professional development is delivered. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) recommendations related to when courses are conducted, training teachers to recognise mental health problems, sharing practice and offering teachers guidance:

Within teacher training courses, to recruit into the profession individuals who have high levels of emotional intelligence, because that’s more important that individuals with first class degrees.

(Principal) All the literature across the world and reports show that it’s the quality of the teachers. In Finland to become a primary school teacher it’s five years. It’ not just can we train people to teach but can you get the people who really can teach and train them?

(Principal) So I think the Department need to be thinking about the teacher training. I think that all teachers should at point of entry into teaching when they do various training modules that should accrue towards Masters Level.

(Principal) Upgrade the level of staff training and include elements of emotional intelligence and grow it within schools

(Principal)

Now I know that there were some issues that were addressed by the Board Services but again it hit us at times when we were doing exams and stuff so you might only get one person out. I personally have a big issue with the training of teachers in term time. I don’t think that works, you take a teacher out for training on behaviour management and while they’re out at training, a sub teacher is brought in and the class may be going crazy with the sub teacher. I think alternative strategies need to be used so that proper professional development can take place outside of the normal teaching day. It would probably be cheaper if courses ran in the evening or a Saturday morning and teachers were paid to go along.

(Principal) So I think in terms of pupils’ mental health teachers are not trained, through no fault of their own, but if they are qualified to know the symptoms then that would help. The behaviours are hidden within a group and that affects their self esteem like to disobey a teacher gives them great self esteem with their peers but what happens when they move on from school and they don’t have those kind of peers to impress with those kind of behaviours? When they realise that what’s been working for them from when they were at school, that they don’t have an audience? And that’s whenever it becomes internalised.

(Principal) I went on staff development courses from the Board and it’s really good to have workshops with other staff from other schools because it’s sharing good practice. That would be something I’d recommend as well having staff coming together more from different boards to share good practice with what they’ve done.

(PD Coordinator) Inset is important too, I suppose a bit of joined up thinking about this too and it’s something that we look at all the time. We’re getting information in from so many sources but if the Department of Education are coming in and saying you know this is what we feel would support you in that or we’re going to invest money and resources into proper Inset for staff to attend whether it’s for my role as VP or targeted to form teachers I think it would be important to do that as well because we need the guidance as well too.

(Vice Principal) Although interviewees talked about different aspects of teacher training and recruitment, the general message appeared to be clear: there is a need to address pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing more explicitly through initial teacher education and continuing professional development.

4.11 Conclusions

In some respects there is a striking similarity between the key issues raised through these in depth interviews and those emerging from the broader survey of schools. Views regarding who are the key

drivers of efforts within schools to promote pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing, as well as the key facilitators and barriers to such efforts resonate closely with the survey findings summarised in the previous chapter. In this sense, what this chapter has achieved, in part, is to give a more grounded appreciation of the experiences and perspectives that lie beneath the statistics generated through the survey.

However, and in other respects, these interviews have helped to highlight other issues that were not so apparent through the wider survey. For example, in comparing the responses of interviewees from high-scoring and low-scoring schools, some further insights have been provided in relation to what constitute good practice, including the tendency for high-scoring schools to:

 Recognise the importance of monitoring and tracking pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing through attempts to make use of some form of audit tool;

 place more emphasis on the importance of supporting staff and providing training; and

 recognise the importance of all members of the school community having a role to place in promoting pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing.

In addition, a number of additional issues were raised through the interviews that require addressing if schools are to be fully supported in developing a whole-school approach to promoting pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing. These were the need for:

 greater clarity regarding what pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing is and what the expectations are regarding the role that schools need to play to promote this;

 more guidance on the importance of audit tools, how they should be used and how they can most effectively inform developments within school;

 more coordination of external programmes and services, with better signposting of the range of supports that are available and how these help to meet the schools’ efforts in promoting pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing;

 more evidence on the effectiveness of the range of external programmes and services that are available to help schools make informed decisions when commissioning these; and

 recognition of the differing issues faced by different schools and thus the fact that schools will need to tailor the specific approach they take to promoting pupils’ emotional health and wellbeing to fit the particular characteristics and needs of their pupils.