The components of a mentally healthy school

We have health and safety policies for children’s bodies in our schools – so why don’t we have health and safety policies for children’s minds and brains too? Neuroscience research is now sufficiently advanced that we have all the evidence we need on the adult-child relationship experiences that cause mental health problems and those that heal.

Painful life experiences, particularly multiple ones, are in most cases the cause of mental ill-health – especially when there is no-one there to help a child make sense of and work through what happened (known as protective factors).

This is reinforced by one of the biggest public health studies of our time, involving 17,000 people – the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study (Anda, Felitti et al, 2006). The study found that ACEs are a leading determinant of all the major mental and physical illnesses in the Western world. ACEs include childhood events such as living with parental separation and divorce, suffering a major loss, witnessing domestic violence, living with a parent with mental health problems or one who has an alcohol or drug addiction.