VLE

Supporting Children's Mental Health and Well Being

The mental health and well-being of your child is paramount to their happiness and success at school. By working as a team with home and school, we aim to support children to feel happy and confident but to also have strategies to cope when things aren't going so well and to know where to go to get help.

As a school, we are introducing a school wide well being program called TrickBox which aims to teach children how to communicate how they feel, develop their confidence, manage their emotional regulation by teaching them calming strategies and allowing them to be creative in their thinking and problem solving approaches.

In school, support for your child comes primarily from their class teacher. We call this UNIVERSAL support - support for all. If you have any concerns about your child's well-being then the teacher is your first port of call. Teachers can monitor children carefully and suggest tweaks and changes to their daily routine to support their well-being. They can also provide some individual strategies and support mechanisms for day to day use.

It may be that your child needs a little more support in which case the teacher may suggest a referral to our school ELSA (Emotional Literacy Support Assistant) for a six week intervention. This will usually involve teaching your child strategies to help manage bigger emotions and self regulate. Please see the ELSA leaflet below for more detail.

If further support is then required, we are also able to access support from Mindworks (formerly known as CAMHS - the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service) in Surrey. Parents can access the MindWorks website and make use of the wealth of resources on there. Please visit www.mindworks-surrey.org for more information. The school SENCO, Rachel Barker, can support families with a referral to Mindworks.

Recently, the school's attached Primary Mental Health Nurse, who works for Mindworks, came to school to offer a parent workshop around 'Managing Children's Anxiety'. The resources from this can be found below as well as some links to useful books and websites to empower parents to support their child.

ELSA.pdf

Anxiety Power point- Primary school incl EBSNA- for parents NBS (1).pptx

The Worry Tree.pdf