 Sfotl iawn, ddodd. Hello, how are you doing? I'm Neil. It's the first time I've worked with an auto cue. So if I stumble my words or anything, then thanks very much. Using wordpress, I guess I'm a user of wordpress. I'm not a developer, I don't know the difference between an action and a filter. Apparently they're all hooks or something. I don't know, so take with a pinch of salt anything to do with technology that I say, I'm not a designer, so if you bleed white space I'm really sorry about my slides, Pikia, you might want to look away for some of this. And I'm also not a psychotherapist, so you might be thinking well, what the hell, why are you talking about websites and psychotherapy and helping children with mental health, so I guess I'm like the corpus callosum that joins the two hemispheres of the brain. So when I, oh we've got no transitions, oh this is going to go badly wrong. Okay so when I submitted the slides we were working with about 11,000 children and cool and then by the time I, no sorry when I submitted the talk title we were working with about 11,000 children, then when we had to submit the slides we were working with about 18,000 children and we're now up to about 44,000 children, so it's going pretty well, it's being well received and that really sort of makes it all worthwhile. So this is going to be really interesting, maybe we'll either do slides or I'll talk or we'll sort of do one or the other, we'll work it out as we go along. So I'm curious as to whether you guys are interested in a talk about technology, as in how did we do this from the WordPress point of view or are you more interested in the sort of mental health side of it and what do we do, how do we use WordPress to help mental health? So if you're firstly, if you're happy to put your hand up to answer these questions can you just stick your hand up? Your preferences aren't going to be saved, this isn't going to be this. Okay thanks. So if you're more interested in learning about the technology of what we do could you stick your hand up? If you're more interested in the mental health side of what we do can you stick your hand up? Sweet. Okay. Right. So I'm Neil, I've told you a bit about myself, I'm the director of a company, I very rarely look like that top photo, it's only when I do stuff like this I tend to look more like the bottom too even when I'm working and I've got little daughter who's two and a half years old and she's hilarious on FaceTime. So the company is called Motional and it's a well it's kind of a cool thing and we'll talk a bit about how it was born and how it formed and how it ended up being a company and not charity and all that sort of stuff and why there's such a need for stuff like this to help teachers with mental health. So there's a thing in schools at the moment where there's just no funding, there's no funding for schools so schools are having to use budgets from pupil premium funding which is to help children that are from low income families or need extra support, have learning difficulties, they get extra funding for those children but schools have to use that funding to buy books and stuff for the rest of the children so that funding isn't focused on those children who need help the most. So there's a massive problem with funding in schools as we probably know which makes it really hard to be a business in the education sector and on average it takes about 10 years for children to receive help from a mental health problem, 10 years and bear in mind that we're only at school for like five or six years per school. So there's a massive disparity between need and offer. So we thought we'd try and do something about it. There are a few different companies and charities that are working really well in this area, helping children with mental health, doing mindfulness, there's a lot of music therapy and art therapy, movement therapy, I think that might have been what was going on downstairs yesterday, I couldn't quite work out what all the things were. But what we try and do is provide a measurement framework to justify those interventions. So those sorts of things help people. We'll know that if we go and sit by the beach for a bit, if we're feeling down or if we're feeling angry, we feel better after we've sat by the beach and there's stuff about the negative ions in waves and broken water that really helps us to change our mood, which is why surfers are always so chilled out unless you drop in on a wave. So 50% of mental health problems appear by the age of 14. So when our brains are developing we have some points during our development where there are massive bursts of neuronal connectivity. So when we're born, we've got all these neurons in our brain, there's hundreds of billions of neurons in our brain, but they're not really connected and it's the connections that make the difference. It's a bit like, look away now if you are a developer, it's a bit like having a database and having a front end but no connection between the database and the front end. You can't do anything with it. Or it's like having a database but with no ID keys or something like that. So we need to do stuff with children to connect those dots, to connect those neurons together. And there are spurts of activity. So about three years old, two and a half, three years old, there's a massive spurt. So if you've got a two and a half or three year old, you're probably going, what is going on? And it's just that they're learning so much. Their brains are so active, they're picking up everything. And it happens again during adolescence. So adolescence is different to puberty. Puberty is a biological thing. Adolescence is a neurological thing. And adolescence starts around 10 or 11 and carries on until about 25. So our brains are still changing massively until about 25. And how is that relevant to the WordPress community? Well, I would imagine that a lot of junior developers and other people that work in WordPress agencies are under 25. So our brains are still changing, which is why mental health is such an important thing for the community to get around and support. 75% of mental health problems are set by the time that we're 24. So by the time the brain stops changing, it doesn't stop changing. But by the end of that massive period of growth. So the World Health Organization did a study and they found that 20% of adolescents, remember up to 25, so you might know an adolescent, you might be an adolescent, may experience a mental health problem in any given year. I love how the mic picked up the bubbles. So this stuff happens to us. It's not other people, this is us. I did press the button. Ah, there we go. So the ACE study. Has anybody heard of the ACE study? Adverse Childhood Experiences? No, awesome. So this is the biggest public health study that nobody's ever heard of. It's called Adverse Childhood Experiences and it was done at a public health centre in America by a guy called Feliti, who's a very cool guy, very sharply dressed, perfectly manicured hair. And he discovered that there was certain, he was trying to work out initially why so many people were coming to his centre again and again and again. So they would fix something that was wrong with their physical health but then they'd be back again and he thought, well, what is it that's causing all this? So they did a bit of a study and he said, oh wow, okay, so I think I've figured it out. And some of this is sort of sensitive material, if any of it affects you, feel free to come and talk to me afterwards. I'm not intending to offend anybody, but some of this stuff you may have been affected by or know somebody who's affected by it. So please do feel free and come and talk to me if you want to clarify anything or just talk things over after us. So he discovered that in the women who were struggling with obesity in his practice, the main cause was childhood sexual abuse or the main common factor was childhood sexual abuse. I wonder if that's the first time that those three words have ever been said twice at a word camp? Cool, not cool, I don't know, maybe it's cool. So he then went on to think, he presented to a conference of medical practitioners and they said, well, you've got 200 people here, that's not a study, we can't do anything with that. It doesn't prove anything. So he said, okay, I'll get more. So he found 17,000 people, he did a study of 17,000 people who were presenting to this health clinic with various physical and mental health problems. And they found that one of the common things was adverse childhood experiences. So they found a list of about 10 things, either physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, multiple house moves, the death of a parent or a loved one, marriage break up and other things. And if these things happened in your childhood, there was a strong correlation between other stuff happening. So for example, depression, learning difficulties, diabetes, heart attacks, these things are all strongly correlated to the number of adverse childhood experiences that you've had. So there are, if you go to ACEs Too High, there's a website called ACEs Too High, which talks about the original study, and you can work out your own ACE score if you're interested. And it sort of changed the landscape of how we work with children from, when I first started working with children, we used to think bloody hell, what's wrong with you? And this is a really naughty child. How are we going to cope with this bad behaviour? So it changed that to goodness me, you're struggling with relationships. What's happened to you? So it really reframes how we think about what children do because behaviour is just communicating emotion. So when we have children that are naughty children, they're just struggling with relationships. They're not quite able to be in relationship with you, or they're trying to communicate another need with you. So ACE scores. The number that most people use is four aces. So if you've got four or more aces, you're highly likely to, not highly likely, there's an increased likelihood of you having depression, other mental health problems, learning difficulties. And this is really cool from a statistical point of view. But what do we do about this? How do we change, how do we use this information to help children? We almost have to go a step back, or maybe it's a step forwards. I need to watch Inception again. But we need to stop these aces from being transferred to the next generation. So my mother is a wonderful woman who was raised in Scotland by Calvinist parents. Scottish Calvinism is very, it's very dur. There's no laughter, there's no joy, there's no, you'll not have music. There's no outward display of love. So as much as she probably thought, I'm never going to raise my child like that. Here I am. And when we come to look at the different emotional systems in the brain in a minute, my scores are that my care and my play systems are very low. So it's affected me even though she didn't mean it to. So we need to, once we have awareness of this stuff, we can start to change the cycle. That was quick. That was a good one. Okay. So moving on to our project. We, when I first started building this thing, I was working for four years teaching teachers about neuroscience and brain development and child development and stuff like that. We used to run 10-day training courses. As part of that, the teachers got this online tool for measuring and doing interventions. So they would answer some questions, like 140 questions or something about a child, and then it would give you some activities to do, like do some feather face painting or stuff like that. And it worked really well, and that company had invested millions in this online product. And I used to go out training and people would say, well, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this with it? And the geek in me was thinking, yeah, that would be really easy. We'd just do something like this. And I'd do a bit of mental pseudo code. And then, so I'd go back to the office and say, hey, we get loads of feedback about this feature or this bit not working, or wouldn't it be cool if we could do this as well? And I got met with a sort of corporate, no, we've spent a million pounds on this, we're not going to change it now, which is completely the wrong attitude. So I built my own. And we figured it would take a while to build. This isn't a massive company with loads of investment. It's me, I had about 500 quid in the bank. So I bought a license for gravity forms and thought, yes, I can do this. And I couldn't. So while we were building, we did a few prototypes, we were involved with another training organisation that has some amazing psychotherapists involved in it, Dr. Margot Sunderland, who works at the Charter Centre for Mental Health in London. She's written loads of books, like what every parent needs to know and stuff like that. So she's very well known in the field. She's amazing and she's batty. And they asked us if they could use what I was already talking about in a bid for a contract. And this contract was the project that we're now involved in. It's some big lottery funding. So please keep buying lottery tickets. And they gave £8.9 million to Head Start Cerno and Cornwall. And the project that these guys in Cornwall put together was outstanding. It really changed the focus from, okay, so we've got this pot of money. We're going to hire some people to do some stuff with some children. They thought that's not going to do it. We need to think bigger. So this problem is so big that we can't just change services. We can't improve services. We need to change the system. So the project leader is really an incredible guy. He does put his cream and jam on the wrong way around, but we can let him off with that. He does some good stuff. So 30% of the waiting of the decision-making process for this contract was based on the tech. And here's me with a £197 gravity form licence thinking, yeah, we can do this, £220 worth of technology project, no worries. So system change, not service change. I'm going to let you into some slightly embarrassing mock-ups and secrets and sort of how we ended up where we are now. So this was my first mock-up. This was a vanilla WordPress install with gravity forms installed. And we had one form that collected student details and then one form that collected these answers and calculated a percentage at the end. I thought it was mind-blowing and so did all the psychotherapists. I think because they didn't really know much about technology. So this was July 2017. This was when we were first starting to build and sort of putting examples together of how we could do this. So then for the designers amongst you, I just want you to notice the fading on the date. So if I can go back one, see how that's black and then it goes to grey. So it sort of indicates that we've moved on a bit. You're starting to get the grip of where I am with design and technology and stuff like that. So this was our second mock-up. We thought, right, we'll give a bit more information. This is what we want to do. This was purely a mock-up. This was not functional at all. And this is what got us that £660,000 project, which is quite amazing when you think about it really. So then this is the next iteration. This was November 2017. We still didn't really have a theme built. We still hadn't got any developers on board. This is just me playing around in paint or something. And thinking, OK, wouldn't it be cool if we did this? Right, yeah, I'll figure out how to do that. It'll only take a month or so. I'll just learn to code. Yeah, no worries. So then in December 2017, by this time, we had a back-end developer on board and he was starting to ask some intelligent questions like, but how are we going to do this? And what else do you need to know? What are you going to need to do in a year's time or two years' time? Who's going to need to see this data? How private should it be? Who else should be able to see the data about this one child? And I was like, bloody hell, yeah. Those are some good questions. So that leads me on to our developer team. So I say developer team, it's one guy and he's awesome. We were using pods, so I came across pods when I started to find out that custom post types might be quite useful and bear in mind that this was always going to be a minimum viable product. I thought that we would use WordPress because a lot of it is already handled. We can throw it up together quickly and you know I can put a theme on a site. But how hard can this be? So I made contact with this guy. I'd been using pods because I realized that I tried ACF for a bit and thought, oh yeah, this is cool. We can put custom fields in posts. That's awesome. But then they didn't show up in the front end and I was like, man, how does this work? So we got in touch with the developer. We came to the professionals. And he's an amazing guy. He's called Yori. He's one of the contributing developers at pods. Oh, 10 minutes, thank you. And I sent him a message on Slack through pods and said, hey man, Scott, who's the lead developer at pods, said that you'd be a good guy to come to for a few hours work because I thought I'd just need a few hours of his time. He's built us about 200 hours so far. So I'd completely underestimated how much work would be involved in making this product. And also that, but because we've been bootstrapping at the hallway long and we've tried to get it out so quickly that we haven't done a lot of research, we've done a lot of research, but we haven't done a lot of forward planning. We haven't had the time to put that time and money into thinking about the future we've had to get it out now. So part of that increase in hours is not just my incompetence and ignorance. It's about the project developing as well. Okay, so he said, yeah, sure. Is anybody Dutch? Can you just think about him saying this in a Dutch accent? So he was saying, okay, but I don't really do front end stuff. I can do the back end stuff. We can put this together. No worries. This sounds like a really cool project, but you're going to need to do the front end stuff. And I said, yeah, yeah, I'll do that myself. No worries. I can put themes on a site. And I was already thinking, okay, so we need to be thinking ahead here. And what's going to be the next version? What are we going to do for 2.0? And we're not even at 1.0 yet. So I was thinking about, I'd heard about headless CMSs and how we can separate the front end and do it in JavaScript. And it's really cool. So I got in touch with this guy called Doug at WP Developers. He was at Workamp London. He's a really nice guy. He's a wizard. And I said to him, I sent him an email on his website. He says, I don't do rush projects. So I said, okay, I saw that you could do some view stuff. And I'm really keen to get you on board for the next level, like our next iteration. He said, yeah, no worries. What's your site at the moment? What's your theme? What have we got to work with? And I was like, well, yeah, you know, it's a work in progress. I'm still working on it. And he was like, so I said, and he said, okay, so when's your deadline? And I was thinking, well, I know this guy doesn't do drosh jobs. And I was like mid December, bear in mind this is early December. We've got like two weeks before we need to release a working model to this £660,000 project, which we didn't get anywhere near £220,000, by the way. We got £6,000. So I said, mid December, I'm sure you can all relate to this. And then he said, okay, no worries. We're going to use Sage and we're going to use Bootstrap. So if you haven't heard of the root stack, this has been really critical to us. Bedrock is a great way of structuring your files. It makes WordPress a bit less sucky. Am I allowed to say that? Thanks. And Sage is the theme that we're using. We're actually on 8.5.1 rather than Sage 9. But Sage is an awesome theme. It's a starter theme rather than a framework. And Trellis does our local environment so that when we've got people contributing or people coming in to do a bit of work on the site, all they need to do is clone the repo run vagrant up and they're away. It also handles all our deployments. Currently we're hosted on Kinster and we can deploy from Trellis straight to Kinster. So it's awesome. His pods, our site, is built with 12 custom post types. Six custom taxonomies and 70 custom fields. We use a lot of bi-directional relationships, which is a pretty cool feature. And their auto-templating is awesome. So pods really helped me as a non-developer to be able to understand and flesh out some of the stuff that Yori was talking about. These are the other things that we use and that are critical to our site. Admin columns particularly makes our back-end stuff so much easier to use. WP all imports so we get CSV files from the school's MIS system management information systems. So we can import all the student details from there. Come and talk to me about GDPR. So where are we going to go? We want to become the default measurement tool for mental health and well-being. So currently there's no standard measurement system and maybe why is a measurement tool important is a whole other talk. We want Ofsted to put emotional achievements ahead of academic achievement. So we think that improvements in emotional skills should be more important than improvements in academic skills because if we go through school and we can't end up being able to be in a room with another person without hitting them or spitting at them or fighting them, how are we ever going to get through life? Even if we can do quadratic equations, we're never going to be able to get the information to know what we need to do a quadratic equation on or pass the information back to anybody if we can't be in a relationship with them. So emotional stuff is really important. We want to work with more than just children so we can work with parents, give some support to parents, to adults, to our ageing population. We want to do some good. We're a limited company. There's often the sort of... When I go to talk to schools and heads and they say, so you're a charity and I'm like, no, we're a limited company and there's that kind of look. You maybe can't see it because of the beard, but there's a sort of look of, so you're a limited company. But then it's more about how you approach business than how your business is structured. So for us, being a limited company is much better. It means I've got a lot more control over what we do and I don't have to do as much accounting. We want to set up emotional foundations so that if we do have any profit, which would be nice, we're going to put it back into training teachers how to use the tool and offering free subscriptions to schools that can't afford it. So where's our technology going in the future? D3.js for our charts and reporting. This would be awesome. I'm not going to talk to you about what it is because I don't really know, but apparently it's very good. We're looking up whether to stay with a sort of all-in-one theme and back-end WordPress or do we split the front-end off or do we rebuild completely with something like Laravel Spark or whatever. What do we do for hosting? Are we going to stay with a managed host or do we move on and start to build our own stack? Obviously a lot of what our website does is very database intensive, so caching isn't a huge amount of help for us. We're going to build some offline resources. So when teachers, when trainers go in to deliver this training to schools, often there's no wireless, there's no internet. Or because we've got 20 people suddenly getting onto the internet at once and haven't optimised my header logo, it just crashes their router. So we're going to build an offline solution. I really want to retain on not-just-for-profit approach. It makes it hard to get investors when you say, yeah, we're not just for profit, but it makes it much nicer to work in. I need to delegate a bit more and we need to look at whether we take investment or go for crowdfunding or do we just continue to bootstrap it and see how it goes. So there's been a bit of talk about mental health. There's been a bit of talk about technology. Hopefully it's kind of tied together in some way for you. I'd like you to just remember that our brains are complex. They're changing and they're changeable. So we're always learning new stuff. We're always adapting to our environments where we're in an environment that's very stressful. Our brains become wired to respond to stress. There's a guy called Bruce Perry that says emotional traits become personality traits. So how you are now isn't just down to you. I suffer from depression sometimes. It's not necessarily because of anything I do. Sometimes it's because of things that I don't do. But it's because of the stuff that's happened to me. My brain is wired to be in the situation that I grew up in. One of the key things about the ACE study was that they found that by getting people to talk to somebody, not a therapist, just somebody that was going to listen, made a massive difference. So there was a lot of worry that, okay, we're asking people about these awful things that might have happened to them as children. They're not going to want to talk about it. The overwhelming response was, thank you so much for asking. I've been waiting for 30 years to talk to somebody about this. So people do like to talk about things. It's good to share. And after those people have talked to an untrained listener, just somebody who said, hey, I notice on your form you put this, how does that affect you these days? That's all they asked. Their GP visits went down by 35%. Their A&E visits went down by 11%. So not just the emotional health of that person, but think of the economic consequences of that. So talk to somebody about stuff, listen to somebody about stuff. I spent hours on this one. So thank you very much for listening. It's been really cool talking to you. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I'm going to be hanging around for the rest of the day as well. So come and chat to me if you want to. It will make me look a bit less lonely. And thanks for your time. Thanks very much. That's an amazing tool, actually. I really like presentations where it's not just about how to use WordPress, but a really interesting example of how it can be used. How not to use WordPress. But no, no, no, no. How it can be used. Yeah, no, it's brilliant. So are there any questions, Neil? Thanks. I don't have a question, mate. Hi. You said that the system needs to change. How is the website going to help in that system change, you think? So at the moment in Cornwall particularly, there are lots of different services. So there's the educational psychotherapists, psychologists, sorry. And there's the social work team. There's the school. And they're all doing a bit of work with the children. And they all do their own thing. So what we're hoping that our system will do is to tie all those things together so that we can do measurements before all this stuff happens. And the school is the hub for this. The school controls it. And then grants access to the educational psychologist to come in and see that record and work with that child. So that we're collecting, it feels wrong to be talking about data and collecting loads of data, but this is what we need to do to start making system changes to see where the problem is. What the demographic of the, not the problem, but where the attention is needed, so by pulling all those resources together, that's where we're hoping the system will change. And that it's not just that we bring a psychotherapist in for this one child, but actually we upskill the teachers by their everyday use of our tool to know more about what's going on in children's brains and to be able to do that stuff themselves to some extent. Does that answer the question? Hi. Hello. Is the system regional at the moment, you mentioned Cornwall, or is it national? Most of our users are in Cornwall because of the Head Start Kono project. But we're already selling to a few multi-academy trusts, so we've got 6,000 children in the east, somewhere I try to stay away from the east, but over in the flatlands, we've got about 3,000 children in and around Cardiff and South Wales. We're sponsoring some initial teacher training in Sheffield Hallam University, so we're going to offer free access to all initial teacher training courses. So we're sort of nationwide at the moment, but spread thinly outside of the Southwest. Thank you. Thanks. Great talk. Really interesting. How do you deal with things like consent? Is that an issue in terms of asking children to talk about their lives and what they're up to in terms of what the parents think or how the teachers feel about that kind of level of personal information stuff? Yeah, that's a really good question, and it's something that we battle with on an almost daily basis. So GDPR and SEND guidelines, special educational needs and disabilities guidelines, both talk about consent or sort of... So we've got two different things we need to worry about. We need... There's the legality of storing data, and there's the legality of practice. So for teachers to practice, they should be doing anything that's in addition to or different from the rest of the school or the rest of the class, they should be providing that in consultation with parents. And schools often err on the side of caution and send out consent form. And it's the same with data, really. I spent a lot of time in GDPR and the legislation and talking to people like Heather and Suzanne Dibble and all sorts of other GDPR experts. And also the ICO, the Information Commissioner's Office and the Department for Education, about, well, how do we handle this consent thing? Teachers are so used to sending out consent forms for stuff because there's a sort of... There's a... What's the word? Caution. Like there's a worry that they're going to get sued. But actually GDPR from what we're being told and advised by our lawyers is... Consent is not the best option for our teachers, for our users. And remember that this is in the context of a school. So for private practices, we've got teams of music therapists, it's different for them. For individual parent accounts and stuff, it's different for them. But in the context of schools, consent is not the best option for them. So the ICO suggested we use public task as our legal basis for processing data because the school has a duty to support the children's emotional health and wellbeing. They said, so do your schools get consent to store math results? Do they get consent from parents to store the homework that they produce? No. It's just expected of them. So it's a really good question. It's a tricky thing. We haven't quite got the balance between telling our users, okay, you don't need to be worried about consent forms. You're legally protected, but it's their decision to make because they're the data controller. Does that help? Thanks. I love talking about this. I spent so much time looking into it, so come and grab me afterwards if you want to. That would be awesome. Did you have any extra concerns following that question about security of the data? Yeah. And how did you deal with that? Okay, so this is where my naivety and ignorance in terms of development has really held me back. At first I thought, okay, we're going to go with the best host that I can find. So I spent as much money on hosting for a couple of months as I could. I went to Pagely. I was paying £1,000 a month that I didn't have. And actually, I didn't really see any difference to my £5 digit lotion VPS because they're designed for sites that are getting millions of page views. Mine was getting one. So we thought about the hosting environment. We settled with Kinster because they've got excellent support. That it works. And they use Google Cloud Storage, which is encrypted at rest by default. So that went some way to allay those fears. Also, all of our results are stored in meta as JSON arrays. So it's impossible to decrypt unless you've got the website to translate it all back into scores and identifiable data. So we've sort of separated the actual data being able to display from the child's personal identifiable details so that if you ever got one bit, you'd never be able to work out who that was for. So there's more that we can do. We're looking at things like, is it Tosny? Tosny, Eric Mann, they provide a sort of secure database instead of using MySQL. So we're looking at stuff like that, but it's definitely something that we're always thinking about. Yeah, good question. Any other questions? On time and in budget. OK. In that case, a great big round of applause for Neil, please, everyone.