Young people craft advice for schools on boosting pupils' mental health

• Provider East Sussex Youth Cabinet/Download Participation Group
• Name Mental health Top Ten Tips

In East Sussex, the Children and Young People's Mental Health and Wellbeing Local Transformation Plan aims to develop an understanding and shared approaches for transforming mental health support for children and young people.

The plan also aims to ensure all services for children and young people and their families in the county play their part in supporting children's mental health and emotional wellbeing, improving professionals' confidence to create environments that prevent issues arising, and to address the early emergence of problems and support children appropriately. The county council, clinical commissioning groups, Sussex Partnership Foundation Trust, schools, and voluntary and sector organisations have worked in partnership to develop the plan.

When the East Sussex Youth Cabinet - made up 11- to 18-year-olds elected by their peers - selected "promoting good mental health" as one of its key campaigns, it presented an ideal opportunity for young people to play an active role in furthering the aims of the plan.

One of the ways was to design a booklet and accompanying posters, with 10 top tips on how schools can raise awareness and challenge the stigma around mental illness, while promoting positive mental health.

Tips included urging schools to take the time to discuss mental health issues, ensuring pupils knew where to go for help and considering having a trained teacher who could be approached with any mental health concerns.

Meanwhile, the booklet also urges schools to avoid unhelpful comments such as "try and be happy", to not let negative comments about mental health go unchallenged and to bear in mind poor pupil behaviour could be a sign of mental health problems.

The project was developed by the Youth Cabinet and the Download participation group, with support from Boing Boing, a social enterprise that helps young people and families exposed to social disadvantage and inequality to develop resilience strategies.

While we're still assessing the impact of the scheme, the booklets and posters delivered to schools around the county have been well received and useful in challenging the stigma which still surrounds these issues.

We and our partners are determined to continue to do everything possible to put good mental health and emotional wellbeing at the forefront of our work with young people - and young people themselves will continue to have a vital role to play.

• Atiya Gourlay is equality and participation manager for children's services, East Sussex County Council
  
  

My View
By Emma Garrood, age 15

Over the last year, we have all had an extremely interesting experience of working as a team and researching into mental health, which has been one of our key campaigns.

Creating this toolkit was an eye opener, not only for teachers but also members of the East Sussex Youth Cabinet.

Working with the Download group gave us incredible insight and we had a lot of fun creating something that meant so much to us all.

We decided to create the Top Ten Tips booklet and poster in order to make teachers more aware about mental health and give them advice on how to handle a situation from the perspective of a young person.

We were all so pleased with the final product and it seems it is being used in schools. We all believe it will make mental health easier to talk about between pupils and teachers.

Our main goal was to help young people with mental health issues be understood and give teachers some ideas about how to help them.