Mental Health in Further Education. Something which all of us want to understand better, although on the surface is something that most within the sector are just trying to cover with a band aid. I came into Further Education wanting to help students, change their lives every day and give them potential and motivation to understand their own self-worth. What I found was students having more negative feelings towards college, their work and themselves because they see the stress their teachers are under. They see the daily struggles of marking, paperwork and scrutiny. They see us exhausting ourselves and ultimately believe it is down to them.

My research over the past three years has stemmed from exactly this realisation, that we need to help our staff before we can help our students. Across the sector we have seen a huge increase in the need to support both staff and students with their mental wellbeing. The Education Support Partnership reported, in 2019 that things such as work-related stress, depression or anxiety accounts for 44% of work-related illnesses, 72% of the staff who took part in the study described themselves as stressed and over half of staff across the sector reporting symptoms such as insomnia. The most shocking outcome of this study, states, “In 2017, 3,750 teachers were ‘signed off’ work on long-term sick leave due to anxiety and mental illness caused by work. This equates to one in every 83 teachers.” (Teacher Wellbeing Index, 2019)

My main focus was to allow staff to see that completing a simple task, which may only take 5 minutes can really help you focus on your positive emotions and allow yourself to build these over time. In my first study, staff were asked to follow a 3 week mental wellbeing booklet, which explored techniques such as colouring, drawing and reflecting using creative tools. Using the Warwickshire-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, we were able to measure the differences in how staff felt over the period of time. Incredibly, every single member of staff who completed this study has reported a positive improvement in their mental health. Warwick Medical School state that an improvement of 3 points or above represents ‘meaningful change’ in an individual’s mental wellbeing. (Warwick Medical School, revised 2019) The lowest change of a participant through this scale was 3, and the highest reported change was a total of 15. No participant lowered their score on an individual question, each at least stayed the same or improved.

From this point, I was able to extend this research into interviews with staff from across all sectors and the country, publishing their individual stories on how mental health effected them, with inclusion of how important creativity has been in their lives also. Interviews & additional information is available via my website jnfrlinsdell.co.uk, where you can explore the all the work I have carried out in more detail as well as access wellbeing pages, tasks and additional research responses. It has always been thoroughly important to be to have this work open, transparent and available for people to discuss, work with and reflect upon.

I want to be able to share this research to show that, the simplest thing can have a huge impact and that, ultimately, in Education, One Person can Change the World.