Mental Health Champions
In October 2021, we invited children in Years 3 - 6 to apply to become a Mental Health Champion at our school. Those who showed an interest were sent home with a short application form to complete and return. They were asked the following 3 questions:
1. Why would you like to be a Mental Health Champion?
2. What qualities and skills do you bring to the Mental Health Champions role?
3. Why do you believe this is an important role to develop within your school?
We were really impressed by the children's amazing replies and decided that some of the children would go through to the next stage.
The next stage was on Thursday 25th November 2021 and in 2 parts:
Part 1 - A short individual interview with Mrs Jones, Miss Haynes and myself, where we chatted about all the great skills and qualities they mentioned in their application. This also included a photo and a short video of the children saying their best quality.
Part 2 - There was a group activity where the children played games with each other. We looked at how they interacted and problem solved with each other.
We have put together a short video celebrating our successful Mental Health Champions and the skills they said they will bring to their role at Underwood West Academy. Please see below.
The successful Mental Health Champions were trained in school on 7th January 2022 by the Mental Health Support Team (MHST) who are a fantastic FREE service that our school has signed up to. Not only do they offer training for our children to become Mental Health Champions and support others but they also support us with individual child consultations with parent/carer permission and group work with permissions too. These groups include "Understanding Your Worries" which focuses on helping children to share worries, build resilience and learn strategies to relieve:
- Everyday worries about coming to school
- General worries in day to day life
- Worries about putting their hand up in class or getting things wrong.
- Feeling nervous about playing out with their friends (being un-liked, people laughing at them)
- Avoiding doing things because they feel worried or anxious about it.
The MHST parents leaflet for their services can be found below.
