Skills-based
The programme develops pupils' (aged 11-14) and teachers’ resilience skills to cope with life’s challenges.These are skills that we can all benefit from and are transferable to all aspects of life whether it's in academia, our social life or aspirations beyond the school curriculum. In this way young people are set up for success and are given the tools to thrive.
Skills gained :
Slow breathing
Applied relaxation
Positive visualisation of a desired goal
Emotional regulation
Like any skill the more you consistently practise the easier it becomes to master. By embedding the skills into the curriculum through frequent audio-track listening and lessons that fit into school timetables these resilience skills become automatic and habitual. This is vital to be well-equipped to manage life's inevitable challenges. Just as athletes train their bodies to achieve peak performance, our programme recognises the importance of training the mind for optimal mental fitness.
Preventative
Understandably a lot of attention and focus in young people’s mental health is reacting to the increasing number of individuals in crisis. We agree this work is important and specialised interventions are crucial. We, among many others, also know that there is so much that can be done through early interventions to prevent individuals from reaching a crisis point. This is where we come in! We develop the mental health skills necessary to help prevent young people from experiencing mental health crises.
Non-stigmatising
The biggest barrier to getting mental health support is stigma. Our programme takes a non-stigmatising approach in key three ways:
The programme is grounded in Sports Psychology and adopts a non-stigmatising, strength-based approach as opposed to a deficit model which has historically framed mental health conditions as negative, perpetuating stigma.
Our lessons and audio-tracks are delivered to the whole-class, meaning everyone accesses skills to boost their resilience and no one individual is singled out. These are skills we all need which can be ‘normalised’.
The lessons increase mental health awareness and promote an understanding to reduce misconceptions on mental health, ‘normalise’ experiences and encourage help seeking behaviours.
Whole-school
By adopting a whole-school approach to wellbeing, schools create an environment in which all members of the school community (pupils, teachers and carers) feel supported and equipped to thrive academically, emotionally and socially. FGFS adopts a whole school approach by:
Supporting teachers and the wider school community with free access to the NHS-endorsed Feeling Good App
Providing mental health training for teachers
Embedding mental health skills into the curriculum
Providing whole-class/whole-year group access to evidence-based mental health skills
Evidence-led
The Feeling Good App- the NHS endorsed programme in which FGFS comes from has empirical backing in improving anxiety and depression scores within the NHS population. Feeling Good for Schools has similarly been researched, tried and tested (see our research below)
- Those with the lowest 20% resilience and wellbeing scores at the start of the programme significantly improved resilience and wellbeing scores compared to those with the top 80% of scores, indicating that the programme is helping those who need it most.
- Pupils who experience the programme were better able to maintain resilience scores compared to pupils in a control group (who did not experience the programme).
- 84% of pupils responding to the class survey found benefit in the programme such as:
- feeling more calm and relaxed
- feeling less stressed
- having better concentration
- having more confidence
