The Crisis that Never Happened?

A few months ago everyone around me who was working with vulnerable young people seemed to be gearing up for a mental health crisis. Floods of referrals would be needed, and who was set up for online consultations? Home visits? Who’s in charge of the trauma recovery programme? Now, from where I’m standing, it feels as if the crisis we were expecting never, really... happened. Or at least hasn’t happened yet. Why?

Landscape #5 by Fabienne Monestier

15 years ago, on the day of the 7/7 bombings, I was working in a large hospital a couple of miles away from Tavistock Square. Please, don’t clap for me. I was an accounts administrator in the private outpatient wing. Anyway, my lasting memory of this day is of all these consultants tearing away from their private consultations, donning scrubs (it was the first and last time I ever saw them wearing scrubs) and milling around near A&E. Ready and, heroically, waiting. For patients that never arrived. The number of people injured turned out to be low enough so that the hospitals nearer to the scene could accommodate the vast majority of them. It was surreal. We all stood and watched as a few people came in with minor injuries, were treated by senior consultants who soon remembered how important they were and palmed their patients off onto a nearby nurse. Normality resumed.

Right now, this scene keeps coming back to me.

It’s early April and Zoom meetings are being called all over the place. Clinical psychologists, educational psychologists, trauma practitioners, art therapists, music therapists, play therapists, emergency mental health practitioners, popping up in all corners of my laptop screen like an enthusiastic army of pixels waiting to help. Plans were put in place. I was responsible for passing on mental health referrals to the appropriate service. Except, I couldn’t find as many as I thought I might. There were a few, of course, but less than in a normal month. I was emailing students, parents, phoning home, sending them messages through Google Classroom, probing all the time, until eventually I sat in front of my CAMHS link clinician, waited for him to stop buffering, and told him that on the whole they seemed… fine.

The children from supportive, comfortable and well resourced homes remain comfortable and supported. And the children from homes where they have had to endure difficult situations have developed strategies for dealing with difficult situations. This is what I have learned. Everyone has to some extent developed skills for avoiding difficult or painful feelings, such as shame, inadequacy, guilt. They might involve ways of avoiding work. Or avoiding people. Or avoiding thinking about the future. Avoiding thinking about the past. Whatever they are, these well-rehearsed, well developed strategies have been just as easy to implement during lockdown as they were when they were at school, if not easier.

My kids who use work avoidance as a self-defence strategy have been able to utilise this magnificently in an environment in which literally none of their teachers are able to meaningfully challenge them on their lack of work. I'm delighted by how well my autistic students seem to be doing. I was worried about their loss of routine, but they've of course just replaced them with routines that suit them better, surrounded by people and things that offer them greater solace than they ever really found at school. Those who work better when allowed to work at their own pace have truly been able to do so. Difficulties with peer relationships? Scared of social situations? Behold your Elysian Fields!

Aérienne by Muriel Napoli

I don't want to sound flippant. There are those I know who have had to endure homes where domestic violence is a constant background noise. Those who have wanted to come back to school as soon as possible for the reprieve that we offer. There are also those who, tragically, have suffered bereavements during the school closures. All these students deserve as much help as they can get, and at my school they are receiving as much as we are possibly able to give them. But the number of mental health referrals is down year on year. And, like over-dressed consultants waiting in A&E, it feels like the crisis that hit is just a bit smaller than the one we had prepared for.

Which on one hand is wonderful news. Kids are better able to cope with these things than we thought? Perhaps. But in the back of my mind lurks another, more depressing possibility. That mental health difficulties are, on balance, more likely to arise when schools are open than when they are not. That the place where I dreamt of students finding a cure for their difficulties, may be the very place making them sick in the first place.

Because school is a place not only where their coping strategies can’t always be utilised, where avoidance strategies can’t be implemented as easily. But it is a place where children are often, too often, forced to confront their feelings of inadequacy, of shame. Where weaknesses and vulnerabilities might be exposed any minute. School serves as a space in which the realities of society, as it is, clash painfully with their versions of how they would like life to be. It sometimes feels like it's our job, as teachers, to shatter their illusions. To wrench them away from the fantasy worlds into which they are so fond of retreating the moment they are given time to themselves. Little wonder they hate us for it.

There Is No Place Like Home I by Beate Garding Schubert

People all over my edutwitter feed have rightly been celebrating how well the kids seem to be thriving since coming back. It’s wonderful to read. Vertical tutor groups, older kids supporting younger. Talking about feelings. They’ve been great on the whole. But the elephant in the room is that they’ve been great because we haven’t been putting them under the same level of academic pressure as normal. No-one's asked us to, and for once no-one's really expecting us to.

Over the last ten years, I’ve watched as increases in mental health difficulties amongst our student population have closely tracked the increase in pressure put on senior leaders to compete for ever improving results. The causal chain is clear enough; stresses and anxieties are transmitted down to classroom staff, and then onto the children themselves. With Ofsted, and staff appraisals, temporarily suspended, this has obviously not been happening these last few months.

But in September these cycles will start up again. The Zoom windows will close, doors to SLT meeting rooms will re-open, and exam results, Ofsted, performance targets, will all be discussed once more. That, perhaps, is when the crisis will really hit. Or rather, the crisis that has been building over the last ten years will resurface, with even greater potency. Six months of “home learning” will leave many of our students with rather cold engines. It’s going to take some efforts to get them started again. Many, I fear, won’t fully be able to. I suspect that the transition towards school opening will be more traumatic than the one that saw their closure. We'll see. Either way, come September I just hope all those mental health practitioners will still be scrubbed up and ready to go.