What is a Senior Mental Health Lead?

The Senior Mental Health Lead (SMHL) role can involve different duties and responsibilities depending on many factors specific to your own school context. Factors that impact on the day-to-day duties of the SMHL include size of school community, demographic of pupil body, local community, location, staff team and current climate or culture in your school.

Many schools see the role as a practitioner who provides direct intervention work with more vulnerable pupils who may be struggling with mental health problems. This may be known as a Designated Mental Health Lead, rather than a senior mental health lead who tends to have more of a leadership role.

Research and practice tells us the most effective way to support mental health problems in children and young people is to develop a whole school approach to mental health and wellbeing – the SMHL is responsible for planning, evaluating and implementing their school-wide strategy to support all pupils (and staff).

For many schools and colleges, the role of Senior Mental Health Lead is a new one. Based on working with school mental health leads for the last 6 years we have put together some guidance for new in post or beginner Senior Mental Health Leads.

If you are looking for training as a beginner mental health lead our introduction to the role course is great place to quickly make a start, you get full access to this online training and a library online learning sessions in our Wellbeing Club Membership.

This article provided a stage-by-stage plan of what to expect as a new Senior Mental Health Lead, with some practical suggestions to help you in your role. You can also join our Facebook Community to network and gain support from peer mental health leads

Stage 1 - Get started in your new post as a Senior Mental Health Lead

Assess your role as Senior Mental Health Lead within your school's overall strategy

Are you a new in post school mental health lead?

Have you been tasked with developing your schools’ approach to mental health and wellbeing?

Perhaps you have been tasked with auditing, supporting, and developing provision for pupil mental health and wellbeing.

Great, how exciting! This is a fantastic starting place to make a big difference to so many children and young people in your school.

This is also a great time to consider the remit of your role. Clarifying the expectations of how your role supports the development of mental health and wellbeing is a great place to start.

Questions to reflect on

• How does your role influence school strategy or overall objectives? For example, are you responsible for leading a whole school approach to mental health and wellbeing?

• Are you developing a policy and processes that support whole school wellbeing?
• How does mental health and wellbeing meet and support your school values (if you have them)?
• Are you part of or working closely with your school senior leadership team?
• Are you a lead mental health practitioner? For example, are your responsible for overseeing, developing, and delivering interventions for pupils that help them with mental health problems or to improve levels of wellbeing?
• Is your role both strategic and acting as a practitioner? Or are these two different roles? Ideally, the Senior Mental Health Lead, develops and leads the whole school approach while other members of your team or partner agencies deliver the direct support to your pupils or students.‍
• What does a Senior Mental Health Lead actually do? Examples include leading a whole school approach through the developing and embedding pathways to specialised support for pupils with mental health needs. Leading training for colleagues in awareness of these pathways and how to support pupils to access them. Embedding and sharing strategies for wellbeing in the school culture including taught curriculum. Then developing or providing targeted interventions for pupils (or staff) yourself or with other colleagues.

Define your role

How would you define your role and remit? Is this understanding shared with your leadership, school governors, colleagues, and pupils? If not, how can you start to promote your work. This will help you gain support for the approach to mental health and wellbeing you are leading.

Work strategically with other senior leaders

How are you working with your school leadership team? When does your role sit within the organisational structure of your school? We recommend the Mental Health and Wellbeing lead works closely with at least one member of school leadership team. The provision you are developing for school mental health will have elements that need to be considered as part of school strategy.

Stage 2 - Plan your school mental health and wellbeing programme or intervention

Now your role as Senior Mental Health Lead is starting to become defined and recognised in the school or college. What difference are you hoping to make? Do you want to develop a school mental health programme, service or intervention? Are you feeling confused or unsure where to start? Why not join our DfE assured Wellbeing Club for Senior Mental Health Leads to help you develop your plans and strategy and use our practical resources that save you time and energy.

Not sure where to start? Here are some tips and ideas for the different types of mental health and wellbeing support that can be developed:

1. Whole School Mental Health and Wellbeing Programme

A planned and incrementally implemented programme for the development of whole school wellbeing, i.e. ‘A whole school approach’?

• For example, you may develop a package of training and support that enables everyone in the school develop positive mental health and wellbeing. For example our Wellbeing Toolkit Course can train your team of colleagues in a range of wellbeing strategies and resources for teaching and learning. helping you develop a cross curricular approach to children and young people's wellbeing.
• Your embedded whole school approach will include staff wellbeing initiatives, classroom or curriculum strategies and developing targeted programmes of support.

2. Mental Health and Wellbeing Service

Do you want to adapt or build a mental health and wellbeing services for pupils or students in your school?

• For example, mapping out all the services that support pupil mental health already taking place in your school. This can include anything that supports the promotion and protection of wellbeing.
• Identifying any gaps in provision and planning and implementing a service offer to address these gaps.

For example, joining our Wellbeing Club will provided you with tools and support to plan and deliver your service.

3. Specialist Mental Health Interventions for Pupils

Are you planning on implementing a targeted programme of support for a certain identified group of pupils (or staff) who are struggling with poor mental health, lacking resilience, low wellbeing, or barriers to learning?

• What format will your intervention take? Options include group work or one-to-one, peer-to-peer or led by staff, provided by school staff or external providers.

• It’s also helpful to consider if the provision is an early intervention; acting early by providing support which stops problems getting worse, provided by yourself, colleagues or even peer led.

• You may also co-ordinate a range of targeted specialised provision for those that are already struggling with some identifies mental health problems. This may be provided by external agencies or providers such as CAMHS and third sector organisations depending on what is available in your local area.

By joining our Wellbeing Club will be provided you with CPD, workshops and activities to develop your specialists mental health interventions as part of your whole school approach

Stage 3 - Get started with your plans

Developing mental health and wellbeing support for your school can feel confusing and overwhelming. There are several factors to consider when starting to develop your school mental health provision.

Delivering targeted pupil support

Will you work with external providers or deliver the programme of targeted provision yourself by upskilling yourself or other members of your team?

For example, you could work with training providers (like us) to train you in classroom strategies for wellbeing that all staff can use, or train a core team of staff to provide targeted interventions for a group of pupils who may be struggling with poor mental health.

Training and increasing staff skills and development

Mental health and wellbeing are everyone’s business. It’s important there is a culture of positive mental health and wellbeing and that everyone has a shared language and understanding of your schools’ approach to mental health and wellbeing.

Will you all staff be trained un supporting pupil mental health or just key members? For example, you can provide an INSET day or staff twilight session to introduce your plans for school mental health and enable a shared understanding of the approach your school is taking. Our Wellbeing Club develops your ability and confidence to empower and inspire your team to make children and young people's mental health something they can influence on a day-to-day basis.

Strategy and Improvement planning

How will leadership be in your plan and implementation? What will their involvement be? How are they supporting you? For example, is there a support on your leadership team? Is mental health a regular topic on meeting agendas and is it part of your school strategic planning. Who else can help you implement changes from a strategic role to influence change?

Gaining support

Who is responsible for making and implementing key decisions or taking responsibility for specific tasks or actions in regard to your plans for developing mental health and wellbeing? Is it ALL your responsibility, who else can help you? For example, it helps if you have a team of like-minded people in your staff team support you implement your plans for mental health and wellbeing. We call these the ‘Wellbeing Champions’, can you identify some key members of staff that can help you?

If you find yourself lacking support in your context, we highly recommend that you explore Wellbeing Club - a dedicated support group for mental health practitioners.

Adopting a whole school approach

Our approach to developing mental health supports the development of whole school mental health, through the application of our step-by-step system model. Please feel free to access our free workshop where we introduce our model, and in the meantime, you may also read an extensive outline about our whole school approach to mental health and wellbeing.

Looking for Senior Mental Health Lead training?

If you are ready to start or develop your role as a senior mental health lead why not join our DfE assured Wellbeing Club? We provide Senior Mental Health leads with a whole toolkit of mental health and wellbeing resources and learning opportunities to either start, develop or embed whole school mental health and wellbeing. Find out more and join here.