Our latest Data in Action story highlights the work of a dedicated team of experts helping school districts strengthen mental health promotion in schools.
There has been wide-spread concern about declining trends in the mental health and well-being of youth, particularly over the last decade. While this concern tends to focus attention on the need for more mental health services and interventions, upstream population-level approaches to promote mental well-being can help improve overall health and wellness, while also reducing the need for more intensive mental health support and services in the future.
With children spending a substantial amount of time in school settings and research demonstrating the protective power of school connectedness, schools are ideally situated to support and implement health promotion efforts. As back-to-school approaches, we spoke with Dr. Alex Gist (former HELP staff and current Health Promotion Specialist for Health Promotion and Health Literacy at BC Children’s Hospital) about how the BC Children’s Thriving School Communities (TSC) team is using the Child Development Monitoring System and other data sources to support BC school districts to help inform school districts’ mental health and well-being work and foster improved student mental health and well-being.
Supporting Mental Health in Schools
While the education sector is just one of the sectors supporting mental health and well-being for children and youth, schools are often on the front lines, supporting the needs and healthy development of students. Efforts to promote mental well-being can be overshadowed by immediate crises and concerns, and without structures, policies, and partners in place to support the work, more upstream efforts to promote well-being can be easily disrupted.
The TSC team is made up of Health Promotion Specialists with expertise in mental health promotion and illness prevention, education, child development, public health, and data science. The team provides support and coaching to school district leaders across BC to enhance existing capacity and reduce barriers for implementing mental health promotion activities to improve mental health and well-being. This work aligns with the BC Ministry of Education and Childcare’s Mental Health in Schools (MHiS) strategy. Now starting its third full year, the TSC team’s Practice Support Coaching Program is working with 20 school districts, with interest continuing to grow. The two TSC team coaches bring real-life experience working in school districts — Mike Hooker is a former district superintendent of Revelstoke, and Dr. Gail Markin is a former school counsellor, district support teacher, as well as past-chair of Social Emotional Learning BC.
The Practice Support Coaching Program provides coaching to district level administrators and mental health coordinators to support their efforts to create, revise, implement, monitor, and sustain tailored, district-wide mental health plans and strategies, starting wherever the district is at in this work.
“We’re a part-time team, and their support made it possible to make real progress without overwhelming staff.” — School District Participant in the Coaching Program
Building Insights Together: It’s a Process
Often, the first step in the coaching process is to understand the current mental health and well-being work within the district by gathering and reviewing relevant data on student well-being and mapping out the mental health and well-being approaches and initiatives already happening in the district.
Drawing on their data expertise, the TSC team creates a data summary for districts, drawing from CHEQ, EDI, MDI, and YDI as available, as well as the Adolescent Health Survey. These sources can provide a wealth of information on factors that schools can positively influence such as children’s health behaviours (physical activity, sleep, and screen use), well-being, social and emotional skills, experiences with school belonging, discrimination, supportive adults at school, and much more.
This step helps districts to gain insights from their data, and eliminates the sometimes overwhelming and time-consuming task of researching, reviewing, and narrowing down relevant data on their own. Once the data summary is created, the coaches offer a workshop with district teams to explore the data together. The insights gained from exploring the data summaries are then used to inform data-driven decision-making through the development of mental health strategies and plans. These workshops are also an opportunity to grow their internal teams by including other staff interested in progressing this work.
“They helped us build a data narrative we could actually use. It really helped when presenting to trustees and senior leadership.” — School District Participant in the Coaching Program
By increasing data literacy and confidence with data presentations as well as insights from exploring the “student voice” perspective offered through MDI and YDI data, district mental health teams can strengthen buy-in on the mental health and well-being work from colleagues, the school board, District Parent Advisory Councils, and others.
“We shared the data summary with student voice teams and trustees. It’s already influencing how we talk about mental health.” – School District participant in the Coaching program
Along with data summaries, the TSC team has created additional resources such as the Mental Health and Well-being in School Communities Self-Reflection Tool based on the Mental Health and Well-being in School Communities Framework which supports districts to move from information gathering and planning to actions and implementation. The program also provides gentle accountability through scheduled coaching sessions that assist mental health teams to keep on track in the midst of already demanding workloads.
Practice Support Coaching — How Can I Learn More?
The TSC team and Kelty Mental Health Resource Centre offer a variety of free services, supports and resources specifically for school communities.
Learn More & Get in Touch“This work is helping us keep a focus on mental health and ensure it’s embedded in our district’s strategic priorities.” — School District Participant in the Coaching Program