Helping children to find their voice

This year's theme for Children's Mental Health Week is 'My voice matters', so how can schools help children and young people to express themselves and feel empowered?

It's wonderful that a light is being shone onto children's mental health this week, and a great opportunity to advocate for giving children a voice. It's been a difficult few years for our kids, especially going back to the Covid-19 pandemic. When schools were closed, and decisions were made about children's wellbeing, their voices were not being heard and decisions were made about them without any kind of representation – which I think is shameful.

We need people to advocate for children, to give them a voice if decisions are being made about them, and for them.

I see the educational psychologist as key to that, especially in a school setting.  In ethical practice we should always be aware of the voice of the child in everything we do as psychologists and in everything we teach them, and that needs to filter towards policy. As chair of the DECP I see one of my roles as doing that - advocating, pushing for the best outcomes for children, and allowing their voices to be heard.

Schools should be essential to any consideration about children's mental health. We often overlook how much of their week children spend in schools, and the role schools play in supporting the mental health of our children. During the pandemic many children were unable to access schools and their teachers, and those crucial relationships and attachments that children have with their teachers and their friends. This access supports the development of mentally healthy children, along with opportunities to play and develop their social skills. School is a wonderful place for children to develop these skills and to become mentally healthy.

Four ways schools can encourage children's voices to be heard

Representation

There are various ways schools can encourage participation - school councils for instance. In many schools, class representatives are invited to attend staff meetings, and children can be in positions of being a conduit between teachers and pupils. Kids are very aware of dynamics in relationships – sometimes they are very aware that they're being 'done to' in schools, and decisions are being made that they're not part of.

Schools are complex environments, just like any organisation or workplace, and  function in similar ways. In either context, everyone feels better if they feel they are being listened-to or heard, and if we are 'done to', we usually don't feel happy about that.

Assemblies and PSHE

Teachers have an important role in letting kids' voices be heard, too. For example, assemblies can be powerful ways of children coming together and talking about what's happening in the school, and for children to feel like they're active participants in the school.

Teachers can do that on a day-to-day basis too. I believe that PSHE (personal, social, health and economics) should be a core subject in all schools – it's an opportunity to introduce children to things like democracy and participation, and an expression of children being an active part of their school community and as a result their local community. PSHE lessons are citizenship classes – they're very important and we don't have as many of them as we should.

Restorative approaches to conflict

In primary schools class teachers have an especially important role, where they're a constant in the classroom all day. There they can weave citizenship into any lesson, and teach valuable life skills like problem solving and conflict resolution.

Conflict is an inevitable part of school life, and children will always fall out and make friends again, and this is natural. However, there are lots of opportunities to help in the process – bringing children together and asking 'what happened here – why did you fall out?' rather than automatically being punitive. Teachers can be looking for opportunities to repair relationships, and for each child to learn about approaches to handling difficult situations.

Bibliotherapy

Finally, reading can be a key way of empowering children, and I'm pleased that the National Literacy Trust are launching some new resources this week.

At UCL, I am undertaking my own research into bibliotherapy; using books and reading techniques as a mental health intervention. Here, children and teachers read stories and talk about the characters, asking questions like 'how is this character thinking and feeling? or 'what do you think this character will do in this situation?'

Those techniques can help build up children's resilience and problem-solving techniques as they identify with characters in the story. They might imagine 'that character's feeling a bit like me at the moment', whether that's lost, lonely, excited, happy, or fearful, and wonder 'what would I do in that situation?'.

This use of books is powerful and unheralded. I would recommend it, and reading interventions more generally, to any teacher or parent who wants to help children know that their voice matters.