The 6th of February 2023 marks the beginning of Children’s Mental Health Week. We are taking this opportunity to encourage children to start conversations about mental health and the factors that can affect it.

This year’s theme is ‘Let’s connect’, promoting the importance of connecting with your community to young people. By connecting with their friends, family, teachers, and the wider community, young people can find support for any mental health concerns that they may be experiencing. It is vital that our pupils recognise that by making meaningful connections within their wider community they can ensure that they will never feel isolated or alone.

At Mountford Manor Primary School, we want every pupil to feel comfortable speaking about their mental health, no matter how big or how small the issue, and to help end the negative stigma that can surround the topic. For Mental Health Week 2023, we will run awareness sessions with the children using resources offered by Place2Be. We will also had a full school assembly today which discussed the importance of Connecting with Others. Finally, On Friday everyone is invited to come to school "Dressed to Express". Dress To Express day is an opportunity for self-expression and celebration of a diverse range of emotions.

At Mountford Manor Primary School, we teach children the importance of looking after their mental health both through their PSHE lessons and through our values based curriculum. In these lessons, pupils look at how to develop resilience and positive self-talk all of which supports the development of healthy mental health. We also regularly update our guidance to staff.

Our Principal, Lee Edmonds, also has this to say about the importance of children's mental health "At Mountford, we value the importance of raising children's awareness and understanding of Mental Health and feel it is vital that we support them in developing strategies to cope in difficult and challenging situations. We feel it is important that children recognise that everyone has mental health and everyone's mental health can be affected (both positively and negatively) in different ways."

We take care to support all our pupils with any mental health issues they might have, but if you’d like to help each other grow this week at home, you can find plenty of resources for parents and carers here: https://www.childrensmentalhealthweek.org.uk/parents-and-carers/