Research demonstrates that parents and carers will usually turn first to their child’s teacher/school for advice on their child or young person’s emotional wellbeing. Yet school staff will often report feeling unskilled, untrained and lacking the knowledge on how to help a pupil with mental health concerns

This information matters because students spend 6 hours per day in school and will often turn to someone they are familiar with to seek support and understanding. Unknowingly, these children are turning to adults that feel unable to help as their ‘job’ is to teach and improve learning, as per government targets.

The training courses The Burden Basket is offering will cover crucial mental health concerns in a practical, understandable way. More importantly, it will provide tools, advice and strategies to help. The following statistics demonstrate why helping mental health as soon as possible is really important:

• Research shows that at any one point in time 1 in 6 children, between the ages of 5 and 16, will experience a mental health problem.
• Among children aged 7 to 16 years in 2022, the most commonly reported sources of help and advice for a mental health concern by parents were education services (32.6%) (from https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-people-in-england/2022-follow-up-to-the-2017-survey accessed 24 July 2023).
• Half of the adults who have a long-term mental health concern began experiencing symptoms by the age of 14.
• It is estimated that every 22 minutes in Britain a child or young person in the UK is bereaved of a parent.
• Approximately 1 in 25 children have experienced bereavement of a parent or sibling – that’s about the same as one child in every school classroom in the country.
• Self-harming in young people is not uncommon (10–13% of 15–16 year olds have self-harmed). Download Distractions handout from NSHN.
• At least 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their life and 1 in 6 adults has a mental health problem at any one time.