 Welcome to today's Bite Size CPD session where I will be, with support from students at Cape Cornwall School, walking you through some simple ideas of what to do if you're worried about a young person's mental health. This is really thinking about how can you be a safe and supporting adult to a child who might be in need. Now, these ideas have all come directly from children and young people themselves as part of the Head Start Kearno project. So a lot of this video is going to be you hearing directly from them and then me building on their ideas a little bit with of course plenty of chance for you to pause and discuss with your staff team so you can think about how to make these ideas your own. When we asked students at Cape Cornwall School what we thought that adults could do to support them, they came up with four things. Listen, talk, time and space. We're going to go through each of those in turn and hopefully you will be able to think of some ideas about how you can use these in your practice to support the young people. In your care. So let's start with listen and I'll roll the video clip. Listen, find a place where you're both comfortable to sit down and listen. Take on board and process what they say. It's important that you know they care. I could teach all day or week or year about listening. There's lots and lots to teach here, but if I was going to give you one tip to take away about how to be a good and effective listener, it would be listen to understand not to respond. You can think about that in a lot of your listening interactions, not just those when it really matters and you're worried about a student's mental health. But if you just stop and catch yourself when you're taking part in any conversation day to day, you will often find if you take notice that you're not really focusing on what the person is saying to understand what they have to say. Often you're thinking ahead to what's my response going to be. But to be a really good listener and particularly if a student needs to open up to us about something that's concerning them, we need to just forget what we're going to say next. That doesn't matter. It's about being here in the moment and hearing what they have to say, listening to understand. No guessing, no preparing what comes next, just listening to understand. So the second thing that the Cape Cornwall Pupils thought was important was time. Time. There isn't an instant cure for mental health. This isn't something that will just heal overnight. Use this time to gain a deeper understanding of their situation. This is a really difficult one for us because as educators we want to help, we want to fix, we want to be the expert. And sometimes there isn't very much that we can do to actually make this better. We can't fix it for people. But my top tip here is to remember that we can always walk with. And actually this journey is so much harder when it's done alone. So even if you can't fix this or you can't make it go any quicker or better or whatever, actually a pupil knowing that you're there, you're by their side and you're walking with them really can make a huge difference. So the third thing that our pupils at Cape Cornwall came up with was talk. Make sure they know they're not alone. It could be a new experience for both of you. Don't be embarrassed to ask questions. My top tip here for you would be embrace the awkward. Sometimes we end up having to have a conversation about something where we don't know what to say. We don't feel like this is expertise that we have. We are worried we might say the wrong thing. We're worried that this might be awkward in some way. And so sometimes what we tend to do there is to avoid this conversation. But actually it's really important to have that conversation. So being prepared to embrace the awkward. It might be awkward for you. It might be awkward of them and go with it. Sometimes you will have this conversation and the outcome won't be what you hoped for. You won't necessarily find that the young person will be receptive to what you have to say. They might be angry, sad, upset or just not engaged with you for some other reason. That's okay. And actually it's important to recognize that sometimes we'll get these difficult responses because this is a difficult conversation. But even if you get what feels like a negative response, this is a young person who now knows that there is an adult here who they can trust, who's on their side, who cares, who's noticed and who's here for them if and when they're ready to access that support. Don't feel like your conversation was a bad one or a waste of time if you didn't get an overly positive response. It's all part of the journey. The fourth thing that our pupils at Cape Cornwall came up with was space. Give them space. Let them come to you. If they're not comfortable, then don't force them to talk but still be aware of the situation. My tip here is that as a trusted adult in a young person's life, if we have reached out to support them and they perhaps pushed us away or not engaged with us, we need to continue to proactively offer that support. So yes, just like the pupils said, we need to give space and recognize that some time might need to pass for them to be ready to share. But actually it's really difficult for someone to reach out and proactively ask for help themselves if we haven't first offered it. So saying, well I'm here if you need me, it's helpful but more helpful is just regularly checking in with that young person and creating opportunities when they could open up and talk to you if they're now ready. Just reminding them that you're there, inviting them to talk as and when they feel that they can, but not forcing it if they're not ready yet. I hope this helps a little bit and gives you a bit more confident in having these kinds of conversations with the young people in your care. I work with lots of people like you and actually whilst often you come to me saying that you need support and input and guidance here, what I find most often is that you have huge amounts of expertise here, huge amounts of skills and actually you're doing a lot of this really well already. Please be confident, keep doing what you're doing, embrace the awkward and go with your gut. When you're worried about a child, be there for them. It doesn't have to be perfect, sometimes it will be messy but it matters. Thank you so much for all you do, it really, really matters.