Mental Health and Well-Being

At Leigh St Peter’s CE Primary School, we take mental health and well-being for all our community seriously.  We are proud to have trained staff in trauma informed and attachment practise.  Our commitment to improving school wide understanding of attachment, trauma and mental health is shown in the training staff have had over the last five years.  We have trained six  TISUK Practitioners, held whole school training and during COVID many staff have accessed a range of webinars and training to support their understanding including PACE, resilience and mental health.   Our school was part of the Place2B, Greater Manchester Mentally Healthy Champions and we have a number of Mental Health First Aiders.  We currently have a Senior Mental Health Lead (Mrs Wendy Cathie – L4 Diploma in Mental Health Aware Leadership and L7 Certificate in Strategic Leadership of Mental Health and Well-being).

We have offered training to our children as well and they have had a range of workshops on mental health and some are Mental Health Champions and  Peace Police (Restorative Interventions). 

Our vision is to provide appropriate training for our school community so everyone becomes trauma informed and our school  is a mentally healthy place for all.

This means we aim to help children and teenagers BEFORE they get mental health problems – to catch them as they are falling not after they have fallen.  Our Positive Relationship and Behaviour Policy has been written with this in mind and using strategies from Paul Dix and TISUK.  We implement many interventions to ensure the relational and emotional health of all. Our interventions are evidence based with the backing of over 1,000 research studies from psychology and neuroscience.  We have strong links with our CAMH’s link worker and other outside agencies that help us to support the school community.  We strongly endorse the statement in the Government Green Paper December 2017 Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision, “ There is evidence that appropriately-trained and supported staff such as teachers, school nurses, counsellors, and teaching assistants can achieve results comparable to those achieved by trained therapists in delivering a number of interventions addressing mild to moderate mental health problems (such as anxiety, conduct disorder, substance use disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder)”.