Meet Daniel: Working as a Senior Children's Wellbeing Practitioner

Meet Daniel Martin, Senior Children’s Wellbeing Practitioner at our trust. In this blog, Daniel gives us an insight into what it is like to be part of a school’s mental health support team in Kent and Medway and his thoughts on being one integrated all-age mental health trust.

“We're a school-based service and take a ‘whole school’ approach, by which I mean working with teachers, children and parents, to support young people with mild to moderate mental health difficulties, particularly around low mood and anxiety. We also offer help with sleep hygiene, managing exam stress and other issues, like understanding and managing behaviour. Our aim is to help them before it becomes more serious, and they need more intensive support.

“Depending on the need, how we help can look very different from person to person. So, for example, if I was working with a teenager who had come with anxiety, we would do one-on-one sessions where we’d look at the triggers of their anxiety, and what's continuing and maintaining that anxiety. We’d likely do some graded exposure where we would encourage the young person to help face the things they’re anxious about in really small, manageable steps to help them build confidence and resilience.

“If it was a younger child I might work collaboratively with both the child and their parent, offering training and development of their parent’s skills. That way they can support their child. And we would do that generally on a weekly basis.

“We’re here to help all school age children in Kent and Medway and currently have teams that cover just over 50% of schools (with the aim of making that 100%). While this is a fairly new initiative everywhere in England, we only started in 2019, we’re already seeing a significant increase in demand for what we do, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. The programme of work, if you want to hear more about it nationally, is the called Mental Health Support Teams (MHST).

“We’re all specially trained for this work, including doing placements in teams while studying, because, while I love what I do, it is hard. There is a lot to manage, especially if a risk is disclosed. But seeing that child able to go to school, or getting over their fear, or seeing a parent feeling more confident in their strategies to deal with difficult behaviour at home is so fulfilling. I enjoy making a positive impact before it becomes a really big problem.”

Upon the recent transition to Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust, Daniel said: “I think having something that's more everything united will mean that we miss less potential issues and minimise barriers. I hope it’ll be easier for us to communicate between teams, which will in turn make it a lot easier to get the children what they actually need.”

If you would like to find your school's mental health support team, you can do so here on our website.