Keep it in mind

Aldar Education on mental wellbeing in schools

The pandemic has brought mental health wellbeing issues in schools to the fore. Kate McMillan, Group Head of Safeguarding & Inclusion at Aldar Education, shares how counsellors, teachers and students are rising to the changes

“The pandemic and the move to distance education has created a lot of challenges and a number of opportunities, says Kate, who also explains how a great deal of loss was experienced by students and families, “especially in the early months or the end of the last academic year.”

The loss Kate refers to is not that of family members due to the pandemic but rather the loss of those end-of-year milestones, which Kate rolls off her tongue like items on a shopping list.

“The important transitioning into your next year group day, the process of going through your A Levels examinations, the celebration of the end of the year, the accomplishments and all the successes you’ve had, and the opportunities to say farewell to your friends who are leaving the country.”

It’s not difficult to imagine, then, how in the early months of the pandemic this sense of pervading loss hung in the air at schools and the challenges were real. Despite this, there has been remarkable resilience among students, according to Kate. “Our teachers have also been creative and counsellors have certainly been very creative to overcome those emerging challenges.”

The challenges are presented in different guises. For those students with specific need types, this was seen in a move away from school. “For some of the students who are vulnerable for a range of reasons, school is their safe place, so for them it is about finding a support system in a different way. And for us, how do we check in on those students online?” explains Kate.

For teachers, the new style of delivery of distance learning programmes was the main challenge. “They were committed and put in extraordinary hours in supporting families onto the online platform, accessing learning and delivering synchronous and asynchronous lessons while at the same time as being isolated themselves in their homes and from their support network. And also worrying about family and friends in other countries who were also experiencing significant stress.”

Aldar Education explored how to increase its support across the group to families, students and staff. Online surveys were the way forward. “The family surveys really very clearly showed us that they needed support on the techni cal side. They also needed schools to be aware that they had multiple children and limited devices. We changed the way we delivered the education to be more flexible and responsive to individual family needs.”

Parents also gained access to workshops and training sessions to help come to grips with the different types of technologies they would have to encounter when helping their kids navigate the online platforms for education.

Teachers were committed and put in extraordinary hours in supporting families onto the online platform, accessing learning and delivering synchronous and asynchronous lessons

Virtual drop-in groups were organised for staff social gatherings, virtual staff meetings and parent meetings focused on wellbeing, and virtual one- to-one meetings were set up for teachers, along with the availability of counsellors.

“The challenges as we headed off into summer was knowing that for many of our families that they would still be remaining isolated without contact with schools. So we put in place information on school type activities, on self-care, and how to remain socially connected while physically distancing from each other,” says Kate.

Challenges continues as students and staff returned to the new academic year. “Most parents have returned to work,” says Kate. “So some students have different or less support than they did. But one of the opportunities is that now they are already up-skilled and adapted really quickly to the hybrid model. For most of our students we are able to check in with them personal in that in-person, in- school time.”

For more information about Aldar Education, visit aldareducation.com