Teachers and health service providers have predicted a huge crisis in children’s mental health needs when schools re-open in September (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/19/therapists-and-teachers-warn-of-looming-mental-health-crisis).
Ieso Digital Health puts the sharp rise down to the cancellation or suspension of face-to-face therapies during lockdown and suspension of NHS referrals and services. The NHS’s Improving Access Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme of face-to-face counselling estimates that by September, 470,000 fewer people will have been referred since before lockdown. When IAPT resumes in October it will be facing a fourfold increase in workload.
Research from the Chartered College of Teaching has found that fewer than 5% of teachers feel confident about supporting traumatised and vulnerable children when schools re-open. A ‘mental health crisis’ is expected and some of the possible problems that teachers feel ill-equipped to deal with include:
- Anxiety
- Bereavement depression
- Trauma occasioned by living in poverty and in hunger crisis
- Damage to wellbeing due to isolation, separation from friends and routines
- Experience of /proximity to abuse, suicide, domestic violence.
Alison Peacock, Chief Executive of the Charted College of Teaching said that ‘the anxiety about pupils’ learning and wellbeing is deeply concerning.’
