Schools wait too long to intervene with mental health.

There's an old adage that "a stitch in time saves nine". It's an old, very practical saying. Putting a stitch  or two in a small tear or hole means not having to spend ages sewing it up later on when the hole has got more serious.

We apply this in schools when we intervene with younger children who have gaps in their learning. We know those gaps will almost certainly grow and get bigger if we leave them. A short, targeted intervention in year 7 or 8 saves a much bigger set of interventions in year 11.

We also do it with behaviour. A thirty second intervention at the door as the child comes into the classroom can save them and you from a stressful lesson - and maybe an incident.

We are not so great with mental health. We seem to think it will go away on its own. That the child will "grow out of it" when they get more "mature". Think about that one for a minute. If children grow out of mental health problems then where in the heck did all the teenagers and young adults with mental health problems come from? We seem to be missing something here.

One problem is that schools are focused on the older year groups, because they are the ones closest to their exams. The urgency to intervene with them is totally understandable - they will produce the results by which the school and its staff will be judged. Results must be as good as last year and preferably better so we plough time, money and resources into exam classes at the crucial moment. More seems to be required every year to get the results and if it continues - frankly -  we are going to need a bigger sewing machine for all those stitches.

I have more than one student in year 11 whose mental health is poor. No, they probably do not have diagnosable conditions but if I were a betting woman I would lay down money that they will do later in life. They have low resilience, low self esteem and respond negatively to stress. Now in year 11, they are that student who just sits and does very little in class. They sometimes "stim" like an autistic child, but mostly they lack even that strategy for self soothing and look outside themselves for distraction. More often than not, they become the badly behaved student who disrupts learning because they don't have other strategies.

On my teacher's desk, I have several sensory toys. These were gifts from the kids I worked with in

the medical unit. They knew all about the need to manage their stress and they had strategies. They taught me a lot about the need to calm the mind. I was not suprised when younger kids wanted to engage with my tubes of gloop, and not suprised when they helped the ASD and ASDish amongst them sometimes. What did suprise me was the effect they have on some year 11 boys.

One boy, sits right in front of my desk. If the gloop is there, then he will turn in over and watch the gloop run through the hole in the middle, creating bubbles and shapes as I talk. He will continue to watch while others start working. It's tempting to prompt him to start too. But he's not ready. When his mind is calm, he starts. The investment of five minutes of gloop watching is worth it. Magic.

Mind you, it doesn't always work like that though. Sometimes he gets drawn into the behaviours of the boys around him and the spell is broken. Ho hum, you can't win 'em all.

Another problem that schools have is identifying the mental health difficulties in younger learners - because teachers are not attuned to mental health, they are often misinterpreted as "naughty".

X doesn't do homework. He lies. He doesn't attend detentions. He makes excuses. He refuses to talk to staff when they are telling him off. He gets aggressive and rude when confronted. In the past he has just walked right out of school. X racks up sanction after sanction but he still doesn't do his homework. He just shuts you out when you try to talk to him.

Naughty, right?

X is making choices, but they are driven by the need to escape from something - ask him and he can't tell you what. The aggressiveness and rudeness are symptoms of the anxiety disorder which runs in his family. If we help him to deal with that stress now, maybe a tube of blue gunk will be all he needs in year 11 to calm his mind. If we don't, then my prediction is that that avoidance of homework will become an avoidance of any work and no amount of frantic stitching is going to have an effect. He may well return to his earliest strategy which was to abscond. Voila! A school refusing no-show for the GCSEs is created.

The frustrating thing is, that if you ask any teacher which of their students has mental health difficulties they will probably look a bit blank. Ask them who they think will turn out to be a problem in year 11 because they will be "just like so-and-so" and they will tell you with unerring accuracy.

Us old lags spot the patterns of behaviours - we just don't neccessarily connect it to mental health and so we apply the wrong kind of intervention. We end up treating the symptoms and not the disease because we don't know what else to do. And that is a problem.

Where schools do have people with expertise in mental health and counselling, they are totally overstretched - usually dealing with year 10 and 11 students. The younger ones are not ignored on purpose, but needs must when the Devil drives and schools are doing what they need to do.

Coming soon - the mental health "sewing kit" that I am assembling for myself...