Resilience and Wellbeing Hubs

All children and young people should be able to enjoy good mental health and resilience, allowing them to be as productive as possible whilst in education and, therefore, productive. The Hubs were needed to improve the availability of mental health support as demand was outstripping supply. Educational establishments needed to be enabled to provide support and prevention at an early stage, the hubs are educational establishment led and, therefore, are more able to understand needs of the establishments themselves and, more importantly, the children and young people within them. Over time this should help reduce the number of young people who need formal mental health interventions.  

We asked for expressions of interest from educational establishments who wanted to run a hub, we were able to offer a wide range of specialisms and offers of support. We received an overwhelming response and were able to partner with many different educational establishments across a range of phases. This allowed us to create the following specialist hubs: 

• Early Years Resilience 
• Wellbeing for Educators 
• Trauma Informed Schools Supervision 
• Medical Needs in School 
• Thrive 
• Supporting Wellbeing & Emotional Resilience through Learning (SWERL) 

The six hubs work collaboratively as a network delivering support, training and resources to schools and settings; enabling support using the same approach, sharing best practice and lessons learned across the area. 

Each hub is developing a sustainability plan to ensure they can continue under a self-funding model. 

Of particular note is the increase in partnership working especially cross-phase, improvement in the awareness of different approaches and a noticeable reduction in referrals for children and young people. The growing networks have facilitated increased cross-phase collaboration alongside the individual hubs working together on similar themes. New schools are adopting new approaches, and existing schools are developing their practice further and sharing their knowledge and understanding more readily. 

As with so much of our work, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll on the effectiveness of this project. Staff shortages and hybrid working has meant that we have seen reduced capacity in some schools and settings to engage with the Hubs. There has been less scope in terms of staff availability to adopt and adapt new approaches despite there being a clear desire from the school/setting to do so. 

Each network has received very positive feedback from mangers and senior leadership team members; they have noted an improvement in the confident delivery of approaches.  

Ultimately, we expect to see a continued and sustainable reduction in referrals for specialist support – this will take time.