THE IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL HEALTH
Four ways to support boarders' mental health.
By Sara Thomas, Assistant Head of School, Wellbeing Lead, ACS Cobham
Article first appeared in TES, 10th October 2024
Prioritising the mental health of all students is crucial. Boarding students are a particularly vulnerable cohort where ongoing preventative mental health support is especially important since many of them will be living away from the familiarity of their home for the first time.
At ACS Cobham, we are home to 193 boarding students from around the world and use the following successful approaches to ensure that student wellbeing never becomes an afterthought.
1:1 Check Ins
Supporting student mental health is all about being proactive and preventing crisis. For us, a strong, familiar staff presence has been the best way to nurture positive student wellbeing. In practice, we hold regular one-to-one wellbeing meetings to check in with every boarder, which is crucial to identify any warning signs that might otherwise go missed by teaching staff. We have ensured that every single member of our boarding staff at ACS Cobham has received Suicide First Aid training around how to have a conversation with a young person that could save a life.
We have found that these informal meetings, when coupled with the warm and approachable atmosphere of the boarding house, mean that students feel that they can come to us when they need help or would like to share their worries.
Following these check ins, cross-departmental and collaborative staff meetings become even more effective in keeping track of each boarder’s overall wellbeing.
For example, at our pastoral meetings we involve all relevant representatives, including the school nurse, safeguarding leads, and school counsellors. This way, staff can work together to identify and unpick potential student issues by sharing observations they have made recently.
Student Ambassadors
Alongside wellbeing policies, it is also important to encourage boarders to become more aware of how they themselves and their peers are feeling. Since we know that teenagers will nearly always prefer to talk to each other about their worries before going to an adult, our boarders have the opportunity to put themselves forward as ‘wellbeing champions’ at our school. This facilitates peer to peer support in the boarding house as well as staff support.
Our wellbeing champions, who are trained to know when they need to pass concerns on to staff, are able to help their friends navigate their emotions and how they are feeling. By supporting students’ independence and confidence in this way, we can ensure that when they leave, they feel better prepared to engage with the world.
Support for International Boarders
Initiatives that foster close social relationships are key to making international boarders feel welcome. At ACS Cobham, new boarding students have a weekend of induction activities before all boarders return, allowing them time to adjust and form connections in smaller groups in their new "home away from home" environment in a new country.
The longest running study on happiness shows that good personal relationships invigorate us and help us to manage stress. As a result, we work hard to ensure that our boarders maintain a network of good relationships with both their peers and staff members. For example, community initiatives such as our “letter project” and “magnetize me” projects encourage students to interact with different people in the boarding house to eventually produce a collective piece of work. This ensures that international boarders are always supported to navigate new situations and remain safe, healthy, and happy.
With our boarding houses being home to students of over 40 nationalities, we also have an engaging community programme in place to mark our diversity. From Persian New Year to Ramadan, the boarding house celebrates all international festivals with special events and dinners, which can include wearing national dress, therefore celebrating the students’ diversity by being inclusive of all cultures.
Cultivating Meaning and Purpose
The extra-curricular opportunities at boarding school should offer more than the usual study time, athletics and musical offerings, and academic challenges. To support wellbeing, many of the enrichment activities on offer at ACS Cobham also have growth and development at the centre. For example, our boarders participate in litter picking walks around the local area and undertake regular volunteering – from running tuck shops for charity and volunteering to spend time with and tutor local Ukrainian refugees – enabling them to gain a sense of purpose beyond their studies.
