1. Whole school and college approach
The Oldham whole school and college approach to emotional health and mental wellbeing, aims to promote social, emotional and mental wellbeing.
The framework offers practical guidance to schools and colleges to develop knowledge and skills to promote mental health and wellbeing and prevent minor problems from escalating into more serious long-term issues.
The document contains key actions that head teachers and college principles can take to embed the whole school approach to emotional health and mental wellbeing.
The actions are based on the eight principles.
These are:
- Leadership and Management
- The school ethos and environment
- Curriculum, teaching and learning
- Student voice
- Staff development, health and wellbeing
- Identifying need and monitoring impact
- Working with parents / carers
- Coordinated support
Each principles has a set of evidence based interventions with objectives and outcomes to deliver the principle. Alongside each principle is a key question and examples of good practice.
This allows schools and colleges and other educational establishments to take a systematic approach to improving emotional health and mental wellbeing.
The self assessment check list
The self-assessment check list has been designed to support the implementation of the whole school and college approach to emotional health and mental wellbeing.
The checklist provides a structured way to establish a baseline against each of the eight principles. The baseline will enable the school or college to make comparisons for planning, monitoring and evaluation. In addition, it provides:
- An opportunity to raise awareness of emotional health and mental wellbeing with school / college staff and pupils.
- A reason to begin a conversation about emotional health and mental wellbeing, and establish new relationships with parents / carers, local community and providers of specialist mental health services.
- Evidence for the school / college to use to highlight the work that is being carried out to promote positive emotional health and mental wellbeing which are linked to the Ofsted inspection criteria (personal development, behaviour and welfare) and NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) guidance.
The self-assessment uses the key questions from this emotional health and mental wellbeing framework, indicators of good practice and progress rating against each core principle.
The good practice indicators will help schools and colleges consider how well current arrangements are working within school / college to support emotional health and mental wellbeing.
The Oldham Graduated Response
All staff need to take responsibility for identifying young people who may be “struggling”. Class teachers or form tutors are well placed to spot early signs of a problem. This may be changes in behaviour, appearance, attendance, attainment or engagement.
A graduated response helps to recognise if this group of children and young people require selected or targeted support to meet their emotional health and wellbeing needs in addition to the universal support already delivered by the school.
This document provides a model based on a graduated response to identifying and meeting the emotional health and wellbeing needs of children and young people in schools and colleges.
- The Graduated Response: A coordinated approach to meeting emotional health and wellbeing needs (.pdf)
Quality assurance framework to support schools
This document is intended to support schools located in the Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust (PCFT) Healthy Young Minds (HYM) footprint in the commissioning of safe and effective emotional health and wellbeing (EHWB) services. It provides commissioning guidance to ensure that any emotional and mental health interventions provided in schools are:
- Safe and effective;
- Provided by appropriately qualified and experienced practitioners; and
- Delivered to ensure value for money and minimise risk to the schools.
The full version of the framework that contains more in depth details: