The Association of Child & Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH) has recently launched an initiative aimed at teachers, to enable schools to access and use resources that can genuinely make a difference to the mental well-being and educational outcomes of young people.

The Mental Health in Schools initiative aims to produce a series of webinars for teachers to give evidence-based knowledge and best practice around current key issues in the mental health and well-being of children and young people.

The initiative is formed of two pilot series of webinars. The first series, Ask the Expert, consists of four webinars with an expert guest speaker, hosted by Professor Barry Carpenter. The webinars have been developed in collaboration with the education charity Coram Life Education and topics are rooted in the new statutory RSHE curriculum.

The second webinar series, Pedagogy in Practice, is aimed at creating engaging resources for teachers relating to mental health teaching themes in the RSHE framework aiming to stimulate innovative practice to meet curriculum requirements and support mental health across the school. The pilot phase will be developed in partnership with Chartered College of Teaching during the first half of 2022.

The next webinar in the Pedagogy in Practice series, Bullying and Loneliness – Pedagogy in Practice, is taking place on 20 September 2022. 

• The webinar will take place at 3.45pm and you can register your interest for the event here.
• Attendees will have access not just to the event itself, but also to supporting materials and resources to help with embedding effective practice in their schools.
• It is exclusively for teachers and school leaders, and Chartered College of Teaching members. 

The next webinar in the Ask the Expert series, Eating Disorders, is taking place on 13 September 2022. You can register for this free webinar here. 

Recordings from the first three webinars of the 'Ask the Expert' series are available for free on the ACAMH website:

• Anxiety – Cues, Clues and Support for Young People in School
• Sleep – Improving Children's Sleep: The role a teacher can play
• Screen Time – Screen Time and Mental Health: balancing the positive with the negative

ACAMH has developed a teacher hub where you can access free resources from the Mental Health in Schools Initiative, including webinar recordings, events and research digests. It plans to develop a wider series of Ask the Expert and Pedagogy in Practice resources over the next 18 months, incorporating topics within the RSHE framework such as trauma, self-harm and bereavement.

To find out more about the initiative, and to keep up to date with the work of ACAMH, you can sign up for its newsletter via its website.