Mental Health Issues and Measures to Support Young People

Surbiton High continues to take big steps to strive towards supporting its students

Prioritising the mental health and wellbeing of our pupils is core to enabling our pupils to flourish. Happy pupils are more able to attend lessons, absorb the curriculum and enjoy the fullness of school life. Surbiton High School has always placed great importance on the role that wellbeing plays to ensure a pupil thrives at school.

All schools have seen the impact of COVID-19 on pupils’ wellbeing – in particular, an increase in anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, eating disorders and stress-related concerns.

Our ‘Charter for Wellbeing’ sits at the very heart of the education we offer. A holistic approach to wellbeing, it is based on the research of positive psychology and what we need in order to flourish. Our understanding of wellbeing– developed over the past six years – has ensured that we have been able to respond to our pupils’ wellbeing and mental health over the past two years.

Our full-time counselling team has supported pupils, both inschool and virtually, alongside our academic mentors, personal mentors and School Nurse. Form Tutors and Deputy Form Tutors provide a dualsupport system, and we have a research-based tracking system in place to monitor our pupils’ wellbeing, enabling us to be proactive in spotting when extra support is needed. Ensuring staff have the time to dedicate to pastoral care, and increasing resources within the pastoral Head-of-Year teams, has ensured that every pupil is given the support they need. During lockdown, we continued with small tutor group meetings and live MS Teams lessons to keep pupils connected, and developed a mental health toolkit to support pupils, which can be found here.

Equipping pupils with coping strategies and being mindful of their own wellbeing needs is a priority at Surbiton High. Through our SCOPE days (Surbiton COPE) - when the timetable is collapsed - pupils are given time to explore relevant themes based on our Charter’s PERMA model (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment). In conjunction with our Parent Partnership talks, we encourage dialogue amongst parents, pupils and the School to discuss all aspects of mental health and wellbeing.

The past 18 months have certainly been challenging, but by keeping abreast of how our pupils feel and adapting the support in place to meet their needs, we have been able to ensure that our pupils have continued to flourish.

BY MATTHEW CLOSE, Senior Vice Principal at Surbiton High School www.surbitonhigh.com/

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