The MY School Health story is deeply personal for me because without the experiences I have had it would never have happened.
MY School Health was founded to make a difference. It stems from my own experiences during childhood as a person with undiagnosed autism and the mental health issues that were a result of that.
My professional nursing history is thirty four years long. I qualified in 1993 as a Children’s Nurse and worked for seventeen years on children’s wards in Newcastle. In 2010 I became a Band 5 School Nurse in North Tyneside. In 2015 I managed to pass a BSc in Specialist Community Public Health School Nursing with First Class Honours. In 2016 the School Nursing Service for North Tyneside was absorbed into the Local Authority because the NHS couldn’t afford to run it anymore. I left not long after this and set up MY School Health. I also worked for a while at 111 and completed a Masters Award in Autism with Distinction. I have no idea why I decided to become a nurse to this day. It just seemed like a challenge.
My personal history is that of a child with autism before anyone really knew that girls could have it. My childhood was one of ‘being weird’.
In 2017 I was working for the Local Authority 0-19 service as a School Nurse. The Local Authority had never wanted to host the service and had taken it on by default. The School Nursing part of the contract contained no statutory obligations, so Health Visiting was the focus. As a School Nurse, I knew how much impact I could have but was frustrated by endless meetings, changes of direction and poor staffing. I hadn’t realised, but the anxiety and frustration had turned into mental health issues and an eating disorder.
I was done with School Nursing.
After a few weeks though this turned to anger. How could the services that had failed to help me as a child continue to be so broken? What could I do to change this?
The catalyst was a song on the radio by The Jam.
‘You don’t have to take this crap, you don’t have to sit back and relax, you could actually try changing it’
This channelled my anger and frustration into finding out what I could do. I decided to completely revolutionise School Nursing from the ground up. I always came from a ‘lets get this sorted’ approach and never cancelled seeing a child in favour of a meeting. If I didn’t know how to do something, I found some training and learnt how to do it. The business grew and I started to recruit other Children’s Nurses. We now are a team of seven nurses.
We now work in 40 schools locally. Our remit is to work face to face, to adapt and change as we need to and to always prioritise the needs of the children above anything else. We go into schools at the same time and day. We work with young people using pathways that I have designed. These are based on the research, current knowledge and our service user feedback. A child who is referred and put on a pathway has a weekly session with a School Nurse. They work on understanding why they may feel anxious, angry, isolated, sad, different or finding school difficult. And they learn ways of managing how they feel. We build trust through consistency and understanding. Our safeguarding and referral policies are robust and based on experience. If we suspect a child needs more support than we can offer, we refer them on to what they need. We work with parents and carers. We make decisions through information gathering, collaborative working, supervision and experience. We work to our scope of practice and escalate anything that goes beyond that. Our team are driven by the wish to help and to change the way children and young people are supported. We are exactly what I had needed in my childhood but didn’t have access to because it didn’t exist or wasn’t working properly.
In July 2024 we registered as a charity instead of a limited company. This is because we want to build what we do to a national level and to do this we need corporate and government support. We want to be able to offer a trained nurse in school to the children who need it most regardless of whether their school can afford to pay us. We also want to start training other school staff in other areas to support children and young people with their mental health especially identifying red flags, behaviours of concern and knowing what to do about them. We have a great deal of good practice to share.
The pathways approach can be used elsewhere in the country to support children and young people in the same way, and I would love it to become the national approach to mental health in schools. The evidence that it works is there, from the young people who stop us in the corridor to tell us how they are doing, to the parents who knock on the car window to say thank you, to the Head Teachers who know what to do when a child in their school is struggling.
Recently we have started to identify trends in young people that we suspect is a direct consequence of the Covid lockdown. More of the younger children struggle to socialise, they have less ability to manage situations that might be confrontational, and they struggle to appreciate the needs of others. We think this is because they were isolated because of the pandemic. This meant they weren’t exposed to experiences at key developmental stages so missed the opportunities to play with other children, learn to share, learn to manage when something goes wrong as well as more simple tasks such as taking off jumpers, putting socks on and rolling up sleeves. The older young people are also presenting with signs that the pandemic has changed their development. They are heavily influenced by social media and struggle with face to face interactions where facial expressions, body language and social appropriateness complicate things. They are also at the mercy of delays during online interactions and difficulties interpreting the meaning and inference of texts and messages and other online communication. This is creating more anxiety, anger and frustration attached to interactions which is in turn creating more stress and catastrophising and making mental health issues worse. Because they essentially spent a year of crucial development isolated by lockdown, they lack emotional resilience, emotional intelligence and healthy ways of coping. Parents have also changed their expectations because of prolonged time spent at home and they use online ways of communicating much more to seek support and guidance. Unfortunately, that comes with very little supervision and can quickly turn into shaming and trolling from others if left unchecked. The virtual world has brought many innovative developments, but it has also created a generation who struggle to talk to each other face to face and don’t know how to manage any form of confrontation. This is why mental health issues in schools are at the forefront of so much public health policy at present.
We can address this through our pathways of intervention and by rolling out the knowledge base we are developing. It is proven in the schools we work in face to face. It has the potential to be ground breaking in leading mental health and emotional well being in schools. As children’s nurses, we are uniquely positioned to deliver this in schools and to support school health staff elsewhere in the country to do the same.
We aim to make this as big and impactful as possible so that future generations can thrive because we supported them to do so.
As I said at the beginning, MY School Health was founded to make a difference and I’m very proud to say that we are every day but we need financial help to do this and we need to make it as big as possible.