The Department for Education has made an extra £7 million of funding available for schools to train their own mental health leads until May 2023. This will enable thousands more schools and colleges to improve their mental health provision and embed a ‘whole-school’ approach to emotional wellbeing, at no cost to themselves. Supporting Education company Thrive will be at the forefront of providing this training to schools.

As a DfE quality-assured training provider, Thrive have been delivering their Senior Mental Health Lead training package in schools as part of this funding programme over the last academic year.

Schools have emerged from the acute disruption of the pandemic into a more insidious crisis of mental ill-health among young people. All the damage done will take time and expertise to mend. Schools need partners with the right experience to make a real difference. 

Thrive have trained over 50,000 educational staff using a rigorously evidence-based model known as the Thrive Approach. The Office for Public Management has found that the Thrive Approach makes school staff ‘better able to support more vulnerable children’ and manage challenging behaviour.

To help schools use their funding to embed cultures of positive emotional health, Thrive has put together a new course package called A Strategic Approach to Whole School Emotional Health and Wellbeing. This training fuses insights from neuroscience and psychology to give educators a comprehensive grounding in all aspects of young people’s mental health.

Each school is eligible to receive £1,200 of funding from the DfE for this course, but to claim it, leadership teams will need to present evidence that they’ve already booked their training. We urge schools to apply as soon as possible to secure their grants.