Health & Emotional Wellbeing
Health and Emotional Wellbeing at St Gerard's
Mental Health & Emotional Wellbeing
At St. Gerard's Catholic Primary & Nursery School Primary School, we believe in promoting positive mental health and emotional wellbeing to ensure that the school is a community where everyone feels able to thrive. Our school ethos and values underpin everything that we do.
Mental Health Support Team
The NHS Mental Health Support Team (MHSTs) in our school work with children and young people, families and teachers, helping to identify and support those struggling with their mental health as early as possible.
The team will provide direct, ongoing support to schools around mental health and wellbeing. This will include:
Providing direct interventions to pupils with mild to moderate mental health conditions, such as anxiety, low mood or behavioral difficulties.
Where young people require specialist support, making onward referrals for pupils to local services, such as child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS).
Providing training, education and advice to school staff to help them better support their pupils around mental and emotional wellbeing.
Championing mental wellbeing and resilience across the whole school community, providing guidance around issues such as bullying and coping with exam stress.
Hope Therapy Dogs
Hope Therapy Dogs specialise in bringing Therapy Dogs to school settings. Collaborating with schools, their team of Teachers, Counsellors, and Thrive Practitioners offer dedicated 1:1 support for children and young people's emotional and mental well-being support for our children run as two hour sessions during the school day each week.
Emotions Coaching
At St Gerard's, our staff are trained in recognising when children need support with their emotions. Many children are unaware of their emotions; they just react with no thought. Emotion coaching aims to support children to become reflective; to notice when they are beginning to feel an emotion and to access the best response for them in that moment. In order to do this we need to train the children (coach them) to recognise how different emotions present physically in the body and through thought, action and behaviour.
The steps
There are 3 key steps to successful use of emotion coaching. Remember, this dialogue can be used at any point whenever you notice an emotion and reaction in a child whether this is anger or delight! We are training children to recognise, accept and learn to manage all of their emotions:
Step 1- Name it to Tame it;
- Name to tame “I think you might be feeling x”
- Empathise “I feel x too when I...”
- Locate “when I feel x I feel it in my tummy/head/heart/muscles etc.”
Step 2- Set the limit;
- Identify in your own head what the child ultimately wants from the situation
- Accept and validate the emotion, explain why the action/behaviour is unacceptable (set the limit)
- Support the child to use ‘I would like’ or ‘I need’ statements to achieve their goal.
Step 3- problem solving.
- Support the child to recognise what they want/need
- Support them to recognise their options
- Scaffold them to be able to choose the best outcome independently
How emotion coaching is used in school
Emotion coaching is used to support children to develop their self-regulation, emotional intelligence and autonomy. As mentioned previously, emotion coaching is not at its most beneficial while children are in crisis. It's a helpful tool to support children to reflect on their behaviour choices either before going into crisis or after coming down from a meltdown. It's important to remember that emotion coaching steps can also be applied to positive behaviour as a method of increasing children’s emotional literacy and ability to reflect and notice their own feelings.
We support children to develop their emotional literacy by talking regularly about emotions steering clear of binary ‘happy/sad’ ‘good/bad’ feelings. We encourage children to recognise all emotions as valid and normal and empower them to exercise control over their actions as a result of their feelings. We are mindful of using a wide range of emotional vocabulary regularly for example by narrating how we see children behaving when they are working together, or by wondering out loud when sharing a class book.
Useful Links
https://www.place2be.org.uk/our-services/parents-and-carers/wellbeing-resources-for-families/
https://www.youngminds.org.uk/parent/
https://www.merseycare.nhs.uk/our-services/halton/halton-mental-health-support-team