Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through to adulthood.

Well-being is defined as a sense of health and vitality that arises from your thoughts, emotions, actions, and experiences. When we have good well-being, we feel happy, healthy, socially connected, and purposeful most of the time.

We tailor our support for our children and young people according to their needs. As part of our ongoing plan, we continue to train staff to identify where pupils' mental health may need some additional help, both from our pastoral staff or access to external services. See below for some of the support available.

• CAMHS
• Service 6 - Happy Head programme
• GP
• Children's 0 - 19 team, including School Nurse team
• Wellbeing sessions with Happy Karen
• Jogo Behaviour Support
• Nurture Group
• Educational Psychologist
• Ask Normen

We provide the following wellbeing activities for our children and young people:

• Meet and Greet
• Pastoral support
• Drawing and Talking programme
• Protective Behaviours
• Emotion Coaching

Mental health and mental illness are not the same thing.   Poor mental health and struggling to cope is also different from having a mental illness. A mental illness or mental health disorder is an illness that affects the way people think, feel, behave, or interact with others. There are many types of mental illnesses/ health disorders with different signs and symptoms.

Generally, the difference between poor mental health and mental illness is the nature of and degree to which the difficulties someone is experiencing is having on their wellbeing and functioning (socially, occupationally and academically). Mental illness typically has more of a significant detrimental impact across many areas of an individual’s life than episodes of poor mental health which may be situation specific or time limited.

Anyone of any age, gender, geographical background, race, ethnicity, class, background, religion, ability, appearance, culture, caste, education, economic status, spirituality, sexual orientation can experience mental illness. 

Not sure if you or someone you know is living with mental health problems? Experiencing one or more of the following feelings or behaviours can be an early warning sign of a problem: