Kerry Bridges has been the Mental Health and Wellbeing Lead at Archbishop Temple Church of England High School in Preston, Lancashire since 2021 but part of the Pastoral and Safeguarding Teams for a great deal longer. She is happy to talk about supporting wellbeing in schools all day long and has a particular interest in staff wellbeing.

In 2023, I decided to start up a Senior Mental Health Lead’s Support Network in my area. In this series of 6 blogs, I talk about why I wanted to do that (and how it didn’t always go to plan) in the hope that it will give you some inspiration if you would like to do something similar. 

If you do and would like some support or to share your journey, please feel free to get in touch with me. I would love to hear your stories.

In last month’s blog, I talked about feeling on my own in the role of Senior Mental Health lead and how I wanted to set up a network for like minded people in my area. Of course, I had no experience of doing anything like that before but once again, I had plenty of enthusiasm and motivation to succeed.

In our area, the Primary Mental Health Team Healthy Young Minds: Primary Mental Health Workers (healthyyoungmindslsc.co.uk) had set up a Mental Health Champions meeting which our Pastoral support worker and I attended. At the end of the session, I decided that it was “now or never” and approached the team with my idea. I wondered if they might let me present to the group next time.

At this point, I should say that I had already built up a relationship with our PMHW team so I don’t think they were that surprised that I wanted to do something and they were very willing to help. If you are thinking along similar lines, I highly recommend getting in contact with your local services and asking them if they will let you jump in on anything they are doing. Even if they don’t have something going already, they may love the idea and want to do something similar. On the absolute outside, it’s great to have someone else to bounce ideas off.

In any case, they very kindly let me talk about my group at their next Champions meeting. Unfortunately (and following on from what I was saying in my last blog about being the only people with the full picture), they introduced the group as for “anyone who has completed the Senior Mental Health Lead training” (Senior mental health lead training - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). This lead to a flurry of emails asking me what the training even was, let alone people actually having accessed it. I realised that there was less understanding around the role than I had previously considered. 

Nevertheless, I planned my first meeting for 4pm on a Monday, ordered coffee and cakes and waited in anticipation to see who would arrive. By 4:30, the total number of attendees including me and our PMHW link was 3. It was pretty clear that nobody else was coming. I started to think that perhaps everybody else knew exactly what they were doing, didn’t need support and it really was just me.

As it transpired, not only did other people need the support but the issue was that a lot of them had not even got as far as I had. When they had been told the group was for trained SMHLs, they felt that it would not be accessible to them. I realised that something needed to change and I wasn’t quite ready to give up just yet so I went back to the drawing board.