Maverick minded: Natasha Devon, DfE schools mental health champion

Natasha Devon was given the freedom to shape her role when she was appointed as the schools mental health champion at the Department for Education last summer. It is an opportunity she has not wasted. “I’m bulldozing my way through the DfE,” she says forthrightly. “I’ve pretty much been doing stuff, then asking for permission. I ask ‘I’m doing this, is that all right?’ and invariably the answer is ‘yes’.”

She elaborates further on the reasons for her urgency. “The danger is getting caught up in endless meetings. There’s willing and budget in the department, but what needs to happen now is some serious organisation.”

She says there are “immediate” and “cost-effective” solutions to improving school mental health: “We need to get things out there as soon as possible. It’s not something that can wait.”

Devon has been visiting schools to talk to pupils about mental health for almost a decade, and her experience on the frontline was exactly what the department was missing.

“One of the very first words the childcare minister Sam Gyimah used in our first meeting was, ‘we have identified this is a major problem in the UK and we know as a government we have a duty to fix it. What we’re looking for is someone with on-the-ground expertise as that’s what we don’t have’.”

Her new role, she says, is allowing her to gather examples of best practice in schools and to then exploit her government connections to provide schools with the best methods for promoting mental health.  

“I ask teachers and young people what the problem is they need fixing, they tell me and I find an expert who has the solution. I work out how to convey that in a way they can relate to, so I’m almost like a conduit between schools and experts,” she says of her role.

“I’m well placed, I can wave things under the minister’s nose and I have a voice. I’m not affiliated with government, I’m not paid for this role, so I have the right to be critical and that’s where my power comes from.

“I’m bringing everything to a central point,” Devon says, adding that she has put her own personal politics to one side.

“I try to collaborate and share knowledge and bring about progress through compromise and pragmatism, and hopefully have a tangible impact that goes beyond debating the issue.”

Devon came to the attention of the government through her work talking to young people about body image, which led to her gaining media work discussing the issue. But her perceived lack of clinical and academic experience has caused some to question whether she has the credentials to be advising government.

“There are a lot of people rooting for me to fail. People have a real difficulty accepting me as an authority figure or expert, and a lot of people who are perhaps doctors with PHDs thinking ‘it should have been me’. That’s the sense I get from the reaction I’ve had. I have to fight to counteract that. All my expertise comes from being on the frontline. ”

Boosting self-esteem

Devon oozes confidence in her own abilities and maintains she is the best person for the job.

Instilling confidence is a key part of her day job as one third of the Self-Esteem Team – a business she set up with two other women visiting schools to discuss self-esteem issues.

Her initial interest in mental health was partly linked to her personal experience of an eating disorder in early adulthood. “I’d be lying if I said the initial spark didn’t come from my own experience,” she says. She concentrated on body image initially, but her work soon spanned across mental health when she saw how intertwined the two issues were.

Regarding her government work, Devon says her priority is to develop a toolkit – “a database where everything is accredited” – that enables teachers to “ build a unique, tailored, safety net for their school”.

She adds: “There’s not going to be one or even two solutions that work for every school. The idea is they can pick and choose what works in their environment, giving them a bit of autonomy. What teachers don’t have at the moment is permission to put these things in place.

“We’re trying to marry this with the DfE and the minister’s agenda to come up with something all-encompassing and cohesive for teachers.”

Despite wanting to align the “what works toolkit” with the DfE, Devon does not agree with everything the department is doing to improve children’s mental health.

Peer-to-peer mentoring is not the “magic solution” the DfE “perhaps thought it was”, she adds. “It has a place within the spectrum of solutions, particularly with [addressing] bullying, but I don’t think it’s fair to expect young people to counsel one another. There’s a danger that if that’s not the intention, that’s how it will be perceived. They have enough exam stress and pressure without adding the pressure of being the primary mental health caregiver for someone else.”

Devon has concerns around the government’s drive to improve mental health training through personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) and the pressure from the sector to make the subject mandatory. She says PSHE should become mandatory, but worries this could make mental health education a “tick box” exercise.

The DfE announced a £3.5m investment for a range of programmes to promote character and resilience in schools earlier this year.

But linking this with child mental health “implies people with mental illness are weak”, Devon explains. “The world isn’t divided into strong and weak people, but divided into people who have a toolkit to deal with what life chucks at them and people who don’t,” she says.

“There is still stigma that comes from seeing mentally ill people as either dangerous or weak, and not wanting to be perceived as weak.”

Another concern is the amount of pressure the exams culture in schools places on children.

“What really irritates me is whenever you talk to people about testing four-year-olds, they always say that is just life, but they forget that a child’s brain and an adolescent’s brain is different to an adult’s.

“If you start testing a child from four, you’re teaching them that someone else’s opinion of them is more important than their own opinion of themselves.

“These things are done with good intentions, but there is no understanding of how a child’s brain works. They think in black and white, there’s no grey area.”

Devon says she wants to see mental health training for those in, and going into, the education and health systems.

“Mental health training for teachers could be really useful,” she says. “If you look at mental health training, considering one in three GP appointments are for mental health [problems], the amount of compulsory training for GPs is tiny.

“I’d like to see a counsellor in every school as well, because not every young person has the confidence to seek help outside of the school environment. If the school counsellor is there, they’re much more likely to talk.”

Another priority of Devon’s is to establish “don’t” guidelines for teaching mental wellbeing to pupils. She recalls how she has been called into schools on numerous occasions “to mop up after a lesson on mental health has gone badly”.

“You’re talking to a group of people at that age where they’re vulnerable and worried they don’t fit in. If you go in and say, ‘this is how you self-harm, this is what they use’, there’s a huge potential to do more harm than good.”

Despite her concerns over some DfE policies, she welcomes the government’s vision for local authorities to have a smaller role in education.

Freedom to innovate

“If you look at independent schools, they have a greater freedom to be more experimental. When I go into independent schools, quite often they’re doing really innovative things because they have the freedom to try.

“They measure the culture of their school and work out what is be