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Today is a very important awareness day, World Mental Health Day, which takes place on the 10 October every year. It is run by the Mental Health Foundation and this year’s theme is to ‘make mental health and wellbeing for all a global priority’.

It is vital that we all look after our own mental health and wellbeing, as well as supporting others with theirs. There has been a global mental health crisis since the Covid-19 pandemic, with people of all ages becoming increasingly anxious and stressed. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there was a 25% rise in anxiety and depressive disorders during the first year of the pandemic. They also stated that there has been a severe disruption in mental health services. The need to nurture our wellbeing and prevent the escalation of more complex mental health problems has never been more apparent. 

Here at nurtureuk, we are dedicated to improving the social, emotional, mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. Numerous research reports, including papers in the International Journal of Nurture in Education, have provided evidence of the positive impact that nurture principles and practices have on children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing. Embedding the Six Principles of Nurture within a school environment and developing an inclusive whole-class approach enables teachers to support all their pupils by removing individual barriers to learning. This can help to make pupils feel safe at school and to be able to get on with other pupils, as well as boosting their mental health and wellbeing by developing their confidence and resilience.

There are many ways to support children and young people’s mental health and emotional wellbeing in the classroom. Some of these strategies include:

• Making time for social-emotional learning, either during targeted PSHE lessons or by embedding it throughout the curriculum.
• Giving pupils the opportunity to practice their social and emotional skills – for example by encouraging them to work in pairs and groups. 
• Teachers modelling good social and emotional skills themselves, when interacting with pupils and other staff members.
• Monitoring the social-emotional wellbeing of the whole class, using assessment tools like The Boxall Profile®.

Implementing a whole-school approach to nurture is the best way to support and improve the mental health and wellbeing of all pupils and staff in a school. Our National Nurturing Schools Programme supports schools to identify children and young people who need additional, more focused support through nurturing interventions, or as part of a nurture group. Teachers can help pupils to develop the social skills they need to thrive and ensure that their needs are met. It’s vital that schools are committed to supporting all their children and young people to achieve their very best and to make their mental health and wellbeing a main priority.

This World Mental Health Day we can all play a part in helping to increase the awareness of mental health and how crucial it is to manage our own mental health and to support others with theirs. Mental health and wellbeing needs to be prioritised all around the world for people of all ages. The rise in mental disorders is a global concern, and it is only together that we can put the right support and interventions in place to help ourselves and others.

The beginning of a new academic year means that children and young people will be making a transition, whether that is to a new year group or bigger moves such as Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3 in Secondary school.

Whatever that move is, it is likely that it will involve changes in classes and teachers, possibly an increase in school size and staff numbers, different teaching styles and a broader curriculum. The social dynamics may also change and children may be faced with a more socially diverse population of young people if they are moving to Secondary Provision, for example.

Nurtureuk’s Six Principles of Nurture tell us that these transitions can be a significant stress for some pupils and that some of our more vulnerable children will need support and additional interventions prior to any changes. Dr Tina Rae, the author of The Transition Tool Box, explains that it is important that parents and school-based staff engage in the process of promoting resilience in children and young people, in all Key Stages and particularly in the stage of transition between Key Stages 2 and 3.

Tina Rae tells us that resilience is not about invulnerability but is essentially about our capacity to cope with whatever challenges life gives us. Continuous and extreme adversity is likely to drain even the most resilient children and adults. But when children are supported in developing a positive appraisal of themselves and think differently or in a more solution-focused way about events, they are then able to feel differently about their own competence. In essence, they believe in their own ability to cope.

She goes on to tell us that resilience is not something that people either have or don’t have; resilience can be taught, and as we learn we can increase the range of strategies available to us when things get difficult. In effect, the theory of resilience provides us with an optimistic message of hope. It is indeed possible to learn resilient thinking patterns and skills that in turn help us to become more accurate and flexible in our thinking and this is important given the fact that stress and adversity are an inevitable part of our lives.

Using Tina Rae’s Transition Tool Box, we have selected some activities to support transitions before your children or pupils go back to school, to prepare them for their new routines and new environment. We will be sharing these activities across our social media platforms over the coming weeks, so be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or Instagram. The Transition Tool Box aims to promote teaching and learning opportunities that ensure the development of resilient children and young people who can cope effectively with the process of change. The resources all aim to promote pupil participation and ensure that wellbeing is further fostered and maintained for all children and young people. Although the toolbox is predominantly aimed at Y6/7, these cards are suitable for all age groups as they can be differentiated and adapted easily, depending on age or developmental stage.

As Tina Rae explains, if all adults involved in developing programmes of support for children and young people become further aware of the importance of developing resilience and the fact that resilience can be taught and further built on then, we can further support the development of resilience and ensure that our children or pupils develop the optimism and motivation necessary to cope with life’s setbacks and changes. We hope that this resource will enable school-based staff and parents to feel empowered to more appropriately and positively support the children and young people they nurture and care for – especially during times of transition.

We are delighted to announce that we are now a Department for Education (DfE) assured provider for Senior Mental Health Leads training in schools. 

Our comprehensive training programmes, The National Nurturing Schools Programme and the Boxall Profile® will support Senior Mental Health Leads (SMHLs) to develop whole-school nurturing approaches to mental health and wellbeing, promoting positive outcomes for children by identifying and responding to their social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs. 

Funding for mental health lead training has been offered to around a third of all state schools and colleges in England for the 2021-22 financial year and the Government remains committed to offering the training to all eligible schools and colleges by 2025. Schools are being encouraged to apply for a grant and can check their eligibility using the DfE guidance. 

nurtureuk’s training will help SMHLs to systematically embed a culture of nurture and mental health support throughout their schools. They will be equipped with both strategic approaches and practical tools, and will be supported by a team of experts to enhance their school’s ethos and practices in a manageable and achievable way.

nurtureuk Chief Executive, Arti Sharma, said: “We’re thrilled to receive DfE assurance for our SMHL training and to be part of this vital effort to better support pupils’ mental health and wellbeing. It is essential that schools are properly supported and equipped to identify and respond to children’s SEMH needs and this funding is an important step in the right direction. We very much look forward to welcoming school staff onto our programmes later this year and helping make a real difference to the life chances of children and young people.”

Our SMHL training programmes will launch later this year. Find out more or register your interest by clicking here.

This blog has been written by Ciaran Thapar, author of Cut Short: Why We’re Failing Our Youth — and How to Fix It.

As a youth worker and writing coach, working mostly with young people who find themselves easily excluded from mainstream experiences of British society, discovering the six nurture principles over the last year has been game-changing. 

Across 2015-2021, I worked for various charities in a range of settings — secondary schools, youth clubs, prisons — where I supported young people with their academic pursuits and provided safe group and 1-to-1 discussion spaces for boys and young men at-risk of serious youth violence. My book, Cut Short, documents much of this work, focusing on the experiences of three young men I worked with (Jhemar, Demetri and Carl) as they navigate through, and triumphantly overcome, the barriers of systemic inner-city inequality. In 2021, following publication, I started thinking about how to merge my youth work practice with my love for writing as an expression-of-self and medium for self-reflection. Around this time, I was contacted by nurtureuk to collaborate on some work, following their reading of Cut Short, and this birthed PATTERN, a writing course for boys and young men at-risk of permanent school exclusion.

I have therefore been on a journey of finding my deeper purpose as a youth worker, while absorbing the principles of nurture into my thinking. The following are some ways in which I have applied them to my practice, and examples of where they can be drawn from the journeys of the characters in Cut Short.

Children’s learning is understood developmentally.

Life circumstances are impossible to control completely, especially if you are a child. This means there is a constant mesh of forces playing into a young person’s experience of life, and therefore their ability to engage in learning, formally or informally. Understanding that education can only be achieved when the learner is given the space to absorb the learnings sounds like an obvious principle, but it is constantly disregarded in the British school system. Those who are able to tick the narrow boxes of high pressure examinations are rewarded; those who are unable to do this become less of a priority. One obvious signal of this is the way that the arts have been dismantled and devalued in recent years, giving way to obsessions with core subjects. Many of the smartest young people I’ve worked with were not able to excel in academic subjects. Their intelligence could shine in safe conversational settings, or in the poetic lyricism of their raps, or in their mature ability to analyse their complex social worlds, none of which is readily appreciated on paper. The fundamental differences between Jhemar, Demetri and Carl is a case-in-point: they are written into Cut Short to demonstrate three diverging blueprints of success, despite all the obstacles that London throws at them, be that academic, social, artistic or athletic. Respect must be paid to the individual and their circumstances in any process of learning.

The classroom offers a safe base.

Too often, in the rush of the timetabled day, it is missed that school regimes can provide safety and comfort to the most vulnerable students. For many boys I’ve worked with, as soon as they step foot outside the school gates, they perceive their life to be in danger. This means that the sanctity of the classroom needs constantly reinforcing. The problem is that, in many cases, this logic is turned on its head: the classroom becomes a place of punishment and shame. In Cut Short, Carl is sent to the exclusion room to sit on his own and face the wall. He is ignored or dismissed by teachers when he tries to speak to them; the more he gets sent to the exclusion room, the more some members of staff treat him automatically as a problem to get rid of, rather than to treat with greater empathy. I have seen this play out during my own time working in schools, and it extends to the way that police, prosecutors, and the wider public can respond to the most socially excluded young people. It is vital that the classroom – and school space in general – is seen as an opportunity to give young people like Carl the chance to unwind, open up about their experiences, and be vulnerable, without the constant fear of punishment or harm. This is the idea behind PATTERN: to provide a regular pattern in students’ lives where they can sit at a desk, discuss social issues and write their ideas down in a way that is valued by relatable mentors.

Nurture is important for the development of self-esteem.

The most important tenet of any youth work I do, and the core message of Cut Short, is to make young people feel like they are valued. If a young person is granted space, support and time to grow, make and learn from their mistakes and develop, and the positive aspects of their journey are reinforced by adults, the strongest foundation for life can be built. One of the main reasons that Jhemar was able to cope with family tragedy, and resist the urge to take justice into his own hands, was the deep knowledge that he mattered to adults around him, his friends and his community. He knew he needed to rewrite the script, because it had been communicated to him that he was powerful enough to do so. Carl was able to halt a cycle of crime and violence, despite the extreme dysfunctionality of his home life, and the risk of being attacked or policed, because he had a range of trusted adults around him to confide in and discuss options for his future with. Nurture ensured these two very different young men were able to develop and hold onto a strong sense of self-esteem. This is what saved their lives, and both are now able to move with confidence and give back to their communities tenfold as a result.

Language is understood as a vital means of communication.

Slang should not be punished, only challenged and collaborated with, for it exists as an adaptation for life on the fringes. Rap music should not be policed, it should be harnessed as a tool of expression, learning and catharsis. Converting the thoughts and mutterings of groups of young people into written words that can be published and handed out to their communities is a deceptively powerful step. Language is so powerful, and can say so much, yet the outbursts of children and young people are often ignored. In our PATTERN writing workshops, every contribution is valued and digested, and each participant is encouraged to write their honest thoughts down in order to understand them better, and place them in a wider social context. Increasingly, rap lyrics are being used in court as evidence to convict young people who write them. There is nothing more symbolic of how British society silences and demeans young people who face adverse life experiences. Throughout Cut Short, I try to show the vitality of music culture, literature and language more broadly as key media for understanding, supporting and communicating with young people.

All behaviour is communication.

When Carl failed to show up to mentoring sessions at his youth club, despite the fact we’d known one another for over two years, I was advised by Tony, my mentor, that he was testing the boundaries of our relationship. By continuing to show up, messaging him each time to signal that I was there when he needed me to be, and letting him come when he was ready, formed an effective communication between youth worker and young person. Working with young people can be frustrating because their behaviour can be testing, but a trauma-informed practice sees this as a product of forces outside of the room, stemming from the past. Receiving behaviour as communication is a great way of sustaining a dialogue with a young person, because it necessarily demands a response – rather than a reaction – and a careful, supportive response can make all the difference. I enjoy working with young people whose behaviour is regarded as poor in classroom settings most because they communicate honestly and aren’t afraid to challenge the structures placed upon their lives. This spirit can be channelled in the most amazing way.

Transitions are significant in the lives of children.

Year 6 to Year 7; school to college; college to university. Moving home (once, or more than once), the coming and going of parents or carers, the turnover of teachers and youth workers. These are all transitions that, if not managed properly, can have an unpredictable and often quite invisible impact on a young person’s life. I’ve learned the hard way — as I show at different points in Cut Short — that my own lack of consistency in certain roles I’ve played meant that I couldn’t forge strong, long-term relationships with staff or young people. I’ve tried to learn from these mistakes and ensure that wherever I deliver youth work there is a sense of beginning, middle and end; some control of structure and closure. But this is only possible when institutions are managed properly and empathetically, and when the wellbeing of staff is ensured, thus making their roles sustainable, which isn’t always possible in cash-strapped schools, youth services or prisons. The most impactful youth work I’ve done, and seen done by others, is that which takes places over the long-term, at multiple moments of transition. Change can be destabilising, but it is also where we learn.

Ciaran’s book Cut Short is now available to purchase in paperback: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/316628/cut-short-by-thapar-ciaran/9780241988701

All children and young people deserve the opportunity to flourish, both in the classroom and beyond. They should have access to the support they need, when they need it, and no child should fall through the cracks. 

This Pride Month, we want to highlight how nurture approaches can support children and young people questioning their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. The six principles of nurture are crucial for creating a safe and respectful environment with trusted adults, where all young people can access the support they need. 

Research from the University of Cambridge found that over half of lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT*) young people did not feel there was an adult at school or college that they could talk to about being LGBT*, and 60% did not have an adult they could talk to at home. Nearly half (45%) of LGBT* young people – including 64% of trans young people – were bullied at school or college for being LGBT*. 

At nurtureuk, we equip and support adults working with or caring for children and young people with evidence-based tools to help them flourish inside and outside of school. We believe that a child’s learning needs to be understood developmentally, and we want to amplify the benefits of nurture for children and young people both within and beyond the classroom. Everything we do is guided by the six principles of nurture. 

A nurturing approach benefits all children, including those who are LGBTQ+ or exploring their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Ryan Gingell-Scott from the charity Allsorts Youth Project, is applying his nurtureuk training and the six principles of nurture to his work with children and young people who are exploring some of these questions.

The classroom offers a safe base

A safe environment is foundational for children and young people to feel calm and welcomed. As well as providing a physical safe space, a ‘safe base’ can also be a person: “The secure base [can be] provided through a close relationship with one or more sensitive and responsive attachment figures who meet the child’s needs and to whom the child can turn as a safe haven when upset or anxious… When children develop trust in the availability and reliability of this relationship, their anxiety is reduced and they can therefore explore and enjoy their world independently, safe in the knowledge that they can return to their secure base for help if required.” (International Journal of Nurture in Education, Vol. 6, p36) 

For Ryan’s work, offering both a physical safe space and a secure person is vital: “Working out who they are, in a safe, respectful and nurturing environment is key to giving them the solid foundations to build upon as they grow up… we provide a place to create those secure attachments and positive relationships with safe adults. This development matters and impacts their journey into being happy, healthy young people who thrive as they grow up.” 

All behaviour is communication

In addition to the immediate community of friends and family, children and young people are also embedded in wider communities that may affect their experiences. These communities could be a range of educational settings, sport, faith, youth organisations or statutory services. Their behaviour may be a product of one or more of these areas of their life and it is important to take the time to understand the entire world around the child to understand what their behaviour is communicating. 

“For many of the young people we see, behaviour has been the only way they can communicate their sense of self up until this point. At times the behaviour is showing anger, fear or upset and we need to work out the driver for the behaviour, and explore this alongside them to unpick what they are telling us,” highlights Ryan.

Language is a vital means of communication

Supporting children and young people to develop their language enables them to communicate their experiences more effectively both in the short and long term. Ryan’s work includes “…developing their language skills as we know this is a vital means of communication. We use activities to help give language to their emotions, to help them recognise, regulate and manage their feelings in a way which is safe. By ensuring we implement the principle of language being a vital means of communication, we are giving them the tools they need to advocate for themselves as they grow up.”

The importance of transitions in children’s lives

Whilst all children experience transitions throughout their lives, the nuances, challenges and complexities associated with these moments for LGBTQ+ children and young people cannot be understated. 

Ryan explains, “As much as possible, we plan for these moments and try to limit the stress, anxiety and fear that usually runs alongside such big steps. Our job is to help children communicate these fears and anxieties so that the intensity of transitions, such as moving to secondary school, is minimised.”

The importance of nurture for the development of wellbeing

For Ryan, the importance of nurture for the development of wellbeing is threaded through everything he does: “We can prepare the children for what is to come and help them establish healthy relationships, set boundaries and clearly communicate their feelings in healthy and safe ways, which in turn makes these big life transitions easier to manage.”

He concludes: “Implementing the nurture principles as early as possible with the children we work with helps them to understand they are deserving of a voice and that it is okay to be themselves, regardless of whether this is long term or just for now. These children are brave, inspiring and full of life…and they deserve nurture now more than ever.”

*Report published prior to updated more inclusive terminology – Lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+)

It is National Children’s Gardening Week, an opportunity to celebrate the fun of gardening for children. It is a great activity for children to enjoy outside in the fresh air that provides a range of additional health benefits.

National Children’s Gardening Week was started by Neil Grant, Managing Director of Ferndale Garden Centre, and one of BBC Radio Sheffield’s garden experts. The awareness week has become an annual festival and it is widely supported by the whole of the UK garden industry.

Gardening is a fun, educational activity where children can learn about the different species of plants and how together we can help them to grow. Children get to learn about the different seasons and weather conditions that may affect plants. It also gives children the chance to find out more about the wide array of animals and insects that live in gardens, and is an excellent activity for children to take part in either at home or at school.

There are many benefits associated with gardening. It can be a very sociable activity, especially in schools. Children can work as a team and it gives them the opportunity to bond with their peers and teachers, as they help to nurture each other as well as nurturing their own flowers. Gardening is a recommended activity in nurture groups because of the positive impact it has on developing children’s social skills. This is especially important for pupils who have social, emotional and mental health difficulties that make it harder for them to learn in a mainstream classroom.

“Nothing comes close to making me as proud as I was watching my nurture group gardening. Each and every one flung themselves into it, they worked together as a team, turn taking and supporting each other. I didn’t see a single phone or headphone all day – which with our lot is a genuine measure of success – until the end when they took pictures to show their mums!” – KS4 Nurture Group Teacher

Gardening also helps children with their sensory development. It can engage a variety of different senses which helps children to recognise and develop them. For example, they can feel the texture of the soil and petals, along with smelling the wonderful scents from all of the flowers. In addition, gardening builds up children’s physical strength as well as developing their hand-eye coordination.

With less children heading outside these days due to TV and other technology, it is vital that we do all we can to reconnect them with the beauty of nature. The lessons that children learn from gardening reap fantastic rewards. By encouraging children to start gardening early, it’s more likely that it will continue to be a hobby for them for life.