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 service that’s been established for 5 years now, to provide early emotional and mental health support to children and young people in school.
The YPMHST is currently working with 49 schools and colleges (13 secondary schools, 31 primary schools and 5 colleges/sixth forms) of the 89 schools in the borough and is reaching around 55% 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. One of our ongoing focusses from the start has always been to see how we can support all schools, as well as schools which are not part of the mental health support team. We have done this via whole school college approach, including training offered to all education staff across the local area.
During this time, we have been able to work alongside other services such as the school nursing team and the education welfare department and supported all year 6 children in the area delivering whole class transition workshops face to face which had a massive impact. The amount of whole school approach we have delivered has also been successfully uploaded on our PARIS inputting system and during the past year we have recorded supporting close to 15,000 young people, parents/carers and education staff with whole school college approach.
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 calmer’, ‘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.
We have also developed a pathway for emotional based non attendance as this is something nationally that has been recognised as a growing difficulty, we have a dedicated worker who will support early signs of emotionally-based non-attendance from all schools within the local area, this pathway has been developed to run alongside HMR’s existing emotionally-based non-attendance pathway and through working closely with attendance leads from the school, education welfare and education psychology, we have already noticed the impact this role is making and we would like to further develop this in the future.
We have also a senior education mental health practitioner who has focussed on health inequalities within our local area, and some of the work she has been leading on has included networking and reaching out through a local radio station who have a vast audience from the South Asian community, she has been able to work with wellbeing ambassadors from various schools to deliver 5 ways to wellbeing sessions, helping the young people to share mental health awareness and give them ways in which to support their own mental health. Another recent focus has been to support sessions around resilience in the local community and currently within our Middleton area, she is looking at delivering the ‘Resilience’ movie from James Redford, the impact of this will be reviewed with a view to then delivering in central Rochdale.
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