As former teachers and educational consultants who specialise in children’s emotional well being and behaviour we have seen the issue of growing anxiety first hand.
We feel it is important to explicitly teach ways to manage emotions as part of the school curriculum make it universally available to everyone in school, not just those who appear to have an obvious problem. In this way we can help all children to recognise their emotions and learn how to build resilience.
It is imperative that the work starts as early as possible so that, as children grow and develop, they are empowered to talk about their feelings, recognise that these emotions are normal and that they can learn ways to cope with any difficult feelings of anxiety with simple and practical strategies.
We need to provide a coherent and robust whole-school approach to helping our children understand and manage their feelings. We must start this work early so that our young children can normalise both the feelings and the appropriate ways to cope with them. Their simple understanding can then be built upon as they develop and mature so that as they reach adolescence, they will already have an armoury of strategies to help themselves. .
We know that half of mental health issues begin by the age of 14 so if we can support children at this early stage we will be protecting them and ultimately long term creating a more mentally robust society.
We have developed a curriculum to tackle anxiety which covers;
• Activities for early years
• Lessons for children aged 4 – 7
• Lessons for children aged 7 – 13
These lessons help children to recognise their emotions and learn practical ways to manage them. The work for younger children is based on a story with animal characters and song.
The sessions for older children are based on a CBT approach where children learn to link their feelings, thoughts and behaviour. They are age-appropriate, safe and easy to run.
Both schemes of work build up a range of age appropriate strategies for children which staff can refer to regularly and children can practice everyday. They can also be shared with parents for the work to continue at home.
They provide a school-wide approach which develops the language of emotional literacy so that it becomes common parlance to notice and name feelings and to help empower the children to manage their own emotions.
They have been welcomed by teachers who are feeling out of their depth with the mental health crisis. They badly need something effective safe and practical that they can deliver in the classroom. We are in the process of evaluating their impact but certainly anecdotally they are making a difference.
They will be published this spring through Routledge.
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