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Mick Waters: “There Is A Lot Less Laughter and a Lot Less Fun”

If we want to improve the mental health of our pupils and teachers, writes Mick Waters, we need to look at how today’s learning environments might be part of the problem…

Mick Waters
by Mick Waters
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It must be a good thing that Nicky Morgan announced last year that every school should have a ‘champion for mental health’.

Quite what they will be responsible for doing, as they sit alongside the champions for pupil premium and ‘British values’, is not yet clear – but with the growing concern about children’s mental health needing considerable attention, the document, the Department of Health’s ‘Future in Mind’ report is to be welcomed. The champions will surely be required to do more than look out for signs of children becoming anxious, depressed, self-harming or worse. Chances are, they will gradually take on the role of the traditional Educational Psychologist and be asked to come up with actions to support those children who seem to be ‘having problems’, and determine whether they have an underlying condition or syndrome and need extra individual support.

Symptoms rather than causes

The downside is that this is likely to continue the pattern of ‘psychology’ being seen and used in a reactive, often negative way where we deal with ‘symptoms’, rather than seek to address causes. What the champion might do instead is to lead their school’s approach to children’s mental health through ‘positive psychology’. This would involve ensuring that the best conditions exist within the school to create positive mental health and avoid problems, rather than mop them up later.

Positive psychology would mean schools making a real effort to understand what we know about child development and the psychology of learning – two areas that have been erased from initial teacher education by successive governments. It would look at some of the ‘brain truths’ that have emerged in recent times through neuroscience. Children’s brains are not miniature adult brains; girls’ and boys’ brains mature at different rates, and can change in response to culture and teaching. These sorts of findings have significant implications for the way we structure our schools and our teaching and assessment.

A school using ‘positive psychology’ would look again at its routines and systems for the day by day organisation of children. Many people do not realise that the reward and sanctions processes they use are based on classical and operant conditioning theories developed through experiments with animals; methods of controlling behaviour that are now banned with dolphins, birds and dogs. Outside of schools, society has moved on to using ‘social psychology’ to manage individuals and crowds, yet we seem to want children treated differently from ourselves – as long as it is with a smile…

Sunny side up

If we want good mental health in schools, then we might also need to look at how we support the adults. The constant pressure of results and inspections seem to create stress in staff. For people in struggling schools, this, coupled with seem to be the increasing belligerent manners of DfE officals, inspectors and Regional Schools Commissioners, creates upset that is hardly likely to engender a positive outlook.

While externally-marked SATs were abandoned by government years ago to reduce stress on children, we now have children tested at Years 1 and 2, with formal assessment for tots aged five. Leadership should balance rigour with humility; children are quick to pick up the nuances of schools where there is tension amongst adults. Whatever else the mental health champions do, they need to remind school staff to keep the sunny side up, to laugh and smile, enjoy life and appreciate what they do.

Schools have changed over the last 20 years. There is a lot less laughter and a lot less fun. Yet schools are strange places, they are funny places, they are odd places. The concept of having all our young together with just a few adults while the rest of the world gets on is, itself, an odd concept. The institutional behaviours that have grown over a hundred and more years are also weird. We should change them, or enjoy them for their silliness.

We should also enjoy the children we teach. They are young, they are prone to making mistakes in learning that will take them further. They will do funny things that make us and them laugh – and we should laugh along with them, as opposed to at them, as they make their way through life. Schools that find laughter typically succeed.

Childhood should be a joyous time, and we should celebrate the fact that we, as people in the teaching profession, have opportunity to be with such innocent and delightful people.

Mick Waters is Professor of Education at Wolverhampton University; the issues discussed above are addressed further in his book, Thinking Allowed on Schooling

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