Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson plan to merge attendance and behaviour hubs in schools as part of a drive to “tackle anxiety and low mood” in the classroom. The pair say their “evidence-based intervention” will “not only halt the spiral towards crisis but cultivate much-needed grit amongst the next generation, essential for academic success and life beyond school, with all its ups and downs”.
square ISABEL HARDMAN You can't force yourself to be mentally well enough to work - I tried
Read More
Mental health is, according to the Department for Education’s own figures, one of the major drivers of school absences: children who are classed as “severely absent”, meaning they miss more than half of their schooling, have mental health that is twice as bad as those who miss only one per cent of class time.
The “growth mindset” theory should involve encouraging children to think that if, for instance, they find maths difficult, that they can still do it if they practice and identify what’s holding them back, rather than just saying “I’m bad at maths”. Many parents, though, know that in practice this can end up being a harried teacher telling baffled children that they need a “positive growth mindset” without really having the time to demonstrate how that might work.
When that happens, what they need is not a mindset but a mental health system that responds quickly. The child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) does not do that. Children are frequently left waiting for months or years for a diagnosis, let alone treatment, and are sent back to their GPs after referrals to specialist services simply because there is no capacity in the system. Average waits are around 100 days, but thousands of children wait more than two years.
It is also much harder to teach children resilience when society as a whole is so unhealthy. I don’t just mean some of the unhelpful messaging about mental illness being a destination rather than something that can be treatable or managed. It’s also that we have a mentally unhealthy world, and seem intent on making that worse.
Parents complain when their children come home from school or nursery plastered in mud, rather than realising that this is an essential and healthy part of their development (and soil contains a bacteria, Mycobacterium vaccae, which increases serotonin release and improves mood). Around three quarters of children aged 11-17 are inactive, even though we know that physical exercise improves mood. And while phones themselves might not be unhealthy, social media can be desperately damaging to children’s sense of self and also their ability to switch off.
So yes, perhaps some lessons in grit might be handy for children: schools shouldn’t just be drilling knowledge into kids, but also encouraging them to be healthy, rounded characters. But it’s going to be much harder to grow resilient children when the world around them almost seems designed to produce exactly the opposite.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Children do need to be taught ‘grit’ – but not like this )
Also on site :