Children’s Mental Health Week 2022 took place from 7-13 February. This year’s theme was Growing Together. Students were encouraged to consider how they have grown and how they can help others to grow. Growing Together is about growing emotionally and finding ways to help each other grow. Challenges and setbacks can help us to grow and adapt and trying new things can help us to move beyond our comfort zone into a new realm of possibility and potential. However, emotional growth is often a gradual process that happens over time, and sometimes we might feel a bit ‘stuck’. Together as a school  we can come up with ideas and tips to bolster self esteem, referee a challenging situation, find a different perspective or just help each other be okay.

So our Year 9 Wellbeing Reps shared their awesome ideas and tips for mental health throughout the week as well as asking each form to come up with three top tips and write it on their Wellbeing padlet. The Reps then selected the best top tips across the school and put them into the GDST Wellbeing Well, which was also shared on the student noticeboard. 

Some of the top tips for strong mental health included:

Spend time with people who make you feel happy

Do things that make you happy – and smile!

Don’t feel guilty about relaxing

Watch Netflix with B&J ice cream

Exercise and stay hydrated

Tidy your room while listening to good music

Try new things or take up a hobby

Deep breathing to calm down when you’re feeling nervous

Spend time with your family bit also have some alone time to

Do something you love

Be present in the moment without distractions like your phone

Keep talking to your friends and family to make it easier to discuss the hard things when they come up

Make sure you have enough sleep

Our Junior School pupils also got involved, contributing some lovely ideas to the Well too!

Some of Year 6’s suggestions included spending more time with pets, thinking about what is good in life no matter how small, read a good book, talk to someone you trust, take a minute to breathe and listen to your favourite music to lift your mood.

Meanwhile Year 4 have been thinking of strategies to cope with worries and to try to bring the sunshine in front of the clouds! (see image to the left)

Our Year 9 Wellbeing Reps also asked to hear students’ ideas and suggestions around the school on how we can raise awareness about mental health. In a brand new initiative, they have also set up a rant box/worry box activity, where everyone is encouraged to write down anonymously any worries, that they can’t do anything about, and put them into the box. The well being leads will then shred these up and make a display out of them in the atrium. This will take shape of a rainbow where each year group will be represented with a different colour. The Reps will then add a feature of positivity in the display including uplifting words, positive messages and ways to help look after your mental health. 

Miss Munro-Hall and Mrs Ferguson also spoke about the importance of children’s mental health & pastoral care in schools as part of their roles as Senior and Junior PSHE Trust Consultants in an article for the GDST which you read in full here.