Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale’s Young People’s Mental Health Support Team
Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale’s Young People’s Mental Health Support Team (YPMHST) is a relatively new service that’s been established to provide early emotional and mental health support to children and young people in school.
Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale’s Young People’s Mental Health Support Team (YPMHST) is a relatively new service that has been established to provide early emotional and mental health support to children and young people in school. The YPMHST is currently working with 38 (7 secondary schools and 31 primary schools) of the 89 schools in the borough and is reaching around 46% of the school age population. The team supports children and young people who may be experiencing low level emotional and behavioural difficulties, such as worry and low mood and they work closely with the school’s senior mental health lead and parents to ensure that children and young people needing support are able to access it in a timely manner within their school environment. The team builds on the emotional and mental health support already in place in the borough, including #Thrive – early intervention service, CAMHS, school counsellors, school nurses, educational psychologists and the voluntary sector to offer timely assessments and interventions for pupils in need, and ensuring a seamless pathway into other services where appropriate.
The YPMHST also helps the school senior leadership team to develop their ‘whole school approach’ to mental health using strengths-based assessments and supporting schools to formulate improvement and development plans with the aim of mental health being threaded throughout all aspects of school life and where it is seen as everybody’s business. Ultimately, through this work we want to support schools to improve the emotional and mental health of all pupils in school. The YPMHST has a dedicated worker within the team to support schools on this journey, which also includes bespoke training to school staff, parents and children and young people from the team and wider services to help them better understand and identify mental health concerns.
We are also really pleased that locally we have an emotional health resilience and wellbeing programme ‘Mindful Movements’, which is currently offered to our primary school children. This programme supports the mental health and wellbeing of all pupil year groups in school giving them tools and techniques to create a better understanding of their emotions and how they feel. This is achieved through physical activity, yoga, mindfulness, relaxation, breath awareness, which link into mental health workshops, including awareness of Five Ways to Wellbeing and mental health in general. The pupils have thoroughly enjoyed these sessions and staff have reported pupils using the techniques they have learned to regulate their own behaviour in class. Children have fed back that it has made them ‘feel more calm’, ‘helped when they are feeling angry’, and ‘helped them to calm down when they’ve felt frustrated’. We hope that these tools and techniques learnt at a young age can provide the resilience our children and young people need to thrive both in education and beyond.
To find out more about our YPMHST, please visit the service webpage at: Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale young people’s mental health support team :: Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust