School teachers have a unique challenge. In addition to education, they also need to raise a red flag when the mental health of their students become an issue. Unfortunately, they can also mistake stress resulting from exams as a lack of mental wellbeing.
To avoid this, the Department of Education in the UK is launching a new initiative for school teachers. Under this scheme, one teacher from each public school will undergo training in recognising mental health issues. This project has government funding of nine point three million GBP.
Talking about the importance of this initiative, the Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, said it is critical to have someone “in school who knows enough about the system and the sort of issues that turn up in young people’s lives and their mental health.”
The need to differentiate between mental health issues from regular stress
Children will undergo “growing-up pangs” and a certain level of anxiety when tests and exams are happening. Such normal emotions associated with growing up should not be “medicalised”.
Dr Antonis Kousoulis is the Director of Mental Health Foundation. In his opinion, “mental health literacy” is not very high among most teachers. He said,
“We don’t want to medicalize the everyday stresses or bumps in the road that all children face. Sometimes when we take a diagnostic medical approach, we run the risk of that.”
The project is coordinated by Anna Freud National Centre for Children. They had conducted a pilot for the project in one thousand five hundred schools.
Jamie Smith, Director of mental health and wellbeing in schools, remarked that there was a significant improvement in the teachers’ ability to differentiate between stress and illness after the training.
The Department of Education had earlier issued clear guidance to teachers so that children with mental health issues would be referred to specialists.
Educational institutions in the US and UK have been conducting research to handle students’ stress levels. The University of Middlesex has taken the innovative measure of “recruiting” dogs to help students deal with loneliness.
