Course content:

This course will spotlight the unhealthy coping strategies used by those suffering from mental illness. The candidates will hear detailed personal experiences  to look at best practice, professional advice on support and strategies for assisting anyone who is going though treatment and recovery phases of their illness. We will look at how much support can be given and at what point does it become a safeguarding concern Finally there will be the opportunity to discuss strategies in an open forum. 

Training topics will include: 

• Unhelpful coping strategies 
• Strategies to support – personal accounts that look at tools for best practice
• Action plans to support mental illness
• Role of the Mental health lead and mental health first aid team 
• Open forum
• Safeguarding considerations 

Audience:

• Healthcare professionals, mental health first aiders, Mental health leads and medical providers. Safeguarding teams.

View the programme

Programme:

09:00 – 09:45

Mental health and mental illness: when is it a safeguarding issue?

This session will explore when mental health issues become a safeguarding issue. It will highlight what we know from child and adult serious case reviews, safeguarding impacts of adverse childhood experiences, holding child safeguarding risk linked to mental health outcomes in-house and consider the impact of poor mental health and the importance of self-care in position of trust scenarios.

• Chair: Claire Dan, Director of Safeguarding, BSA Group, and Director, Sacpa
• Speaker:
  • Phillip Beisty, UKCP reg Psychotherapeutic Counsellor and Safeguarding Lead, OneBright Mental Health

10:00 – 11:00

Case reviews: eating disorders and suicide

This session will use two in-depth case studies surrounding mental illness, following both the school and pupil journey. We’ll highlight the positives and negatives, as well as the lessons learnt, using the case studies as a tool fundamental to positive outcomes.

• Chair: Jane Graham, Director, Hieda
• Speakers:
  • Camilla Read, Lead Nurse, Lord Wandsworth College
  • Rebecca Thomson, Partnership Manager, Tellmi App

11:00 – 11:30

Break

11:30 – 12:30

When do suicidal thoughts become a safeguarding issue?

This session will look at case studies of young people struggling with thoughts of harm and emotional distress. This session identifies additional supports used to help a person in the wider team.

• Chair: Claire Dan, Director of Safeguarding, BSA Group, and Director, Sacpa
• Speaker:
  • Sarah Ashworth, Schools and Families Program Director, Charlie Waller Trust

12:30 – 13:30

Lunch Break 

13:30 – 14:30

Keynote: Building #NeuroNinjas: Strategies to Support Young People & Parents Build Mind Management Skills to Manage Our Brain’s Worry System

In this inspiring, innovative and engaging keynote Andrew Wright CEO of Action Your Potential (AYP) will share with delegates strategies to support young people, the staff who support them and their parents and carers to build metacognitive skills to learn to manage the brain’s worry system.

Our brains are negatively biased and experience anxiety and worry whenever we encounter uncertainty or change.  In an intense 21st century world where the digital realm offers complex, volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous input for our children’s (and our) brains there is an urgent need to help young people and their parents learn to manage the brain’s worry system.  An out–of-control worry system can lead to extreme suffering, malignant rumination, oceans of emotional pain and suicidal ideation.

By teaching young people and their parents the skills of Mind Management Action Your Potential works to support the powerful aims of the Molly Rose Foundation to raise awareness of the dangers of digital harm for our young people and how to build the daily behaviours to support living in our amazing brains and bodies in balance.  This talk is about empowering and informing everyone who supports children to take daily action to help them learn skills that will help them manage their brain’s worry system not just today, but in perpetuity.  As a teaser here is a video AYP made to celebrate World Mental Health Day on 10 October 2022.

Andrew’s preparation and delivering time for this talk is donated for free as part of AYP’s support for the incredibly important and wonderful work of the Molly Rose Foundation.

• Chair: Jane Graham, Diretor, Hieda
• Speaker:
  • Andrew Wright, Former Boarding School Deputy Head and DSL, Speaker for Action Your Potential

14:30 – 14.45

Break

14:45 – 15:45

My story

Amelia Baron is a successful artist, using art to express her journey and experience with mental illness. Amelia will talk about her experience with eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide. She will also speak frankly about the helpful, and unhelpful, support strategies used during her recovery. Amelia offers a unique insight into the journey of a teenager and young adult that will inspire and encourage us to help those in need.

• Chair: Claire Dan, Director of Safeguarding, BSA Group, and Director, Sacpa
• Speaker:
  • Amelia Baron, Anorexia survivor

16:00 – 16:45

Open Discussion about mental health issues

Join the discussion about support plans, reasonable adjustments, duty of care and risk assessments to demonstrate all avenues have been explored. Delegates will have the opportunity to ask questions about the practical implementation of responses to mental health concerns.

• Chair: Claire Dan, Director of Safeguarding, BSA Group, and Director, Sacpa
• Speakers:
  • Jane Graham, Director, Hieda
  • Katrin Viella, Mental Health and First Aid Lead, Psychologist, MindUK and other charities supporting mental health

16:45

Conference Close

Cost:

• Member Rate: £195
• Non-member Rate: £390

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*If you would like to become a member and access discounted rates for Sacpa CPD and events, please click here.

Speakers: 

Jane Graham, Director, Hieda and Health & Wellbeing Director, BSA Group

Trained at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, Jane has over  30 years of nursing background, Many of them in trauma and intensive care. Whilst in PICU, she had a number of different roles. Nine years of that included a role as a specialist retrieval nurse (CATS) that entailed travelling around the country to stabilise and bring back critically unstable children. To do this she learned advanced nursing and basic medical skills in resuscitation, all medical conditions, and trauma.

She went on to teach these skills to student nurses, qualified nurses and junior doctors as the Practice educator on intensive care. This role also involved lecturing regularly at South Bank University. She has been a DSL for Safeguarding at an independent boarding school where she was Lead Nurse. She is also an instructor for Qualsafe, an awarding body approved by the HSE. She is currently the director of Hieda and director of health and wellbeing for the BSA Group.

Claire Dan, Director, Sacpa

Claire is Director of Safeguarding and Director, Sacpa and leads on the provision of safeguarding advice and support to members and the development and delivery of CPD and safeguarding consultancy services. Claire is a safeguarding specialist and leader with a background in education welfare, youth justice, and early help contexts which have involved a strong focus on diverse and collaborative partnerships, professional development and supervision of front-line safeguarding colleagues, and leading multi-disciplinary teams and projects. Between 2006 and 2013 Claire was involved with Luton Safeguarding Children Board as a lead multi-agency safeguarding trainer, developing and delivering single and multi-agency safeguarding training, and since 2013 has delivered pieces of bespoke consultancy work, and providing a range of safeguarding consultancy on a freelance basis.

Phillip Beisty, UKCP reg Psychotherapeutic Counsellor and Safeguarding Lead, OneBright Mental Health

Phill is safeguarding lead for Onebright Ltd a mental health provider across the UK.  His role involves oversight of safeguarding within the mental health context ensuring that clients accessing mental health care are appropriately safeguarded.  Phill is an integrative practitioner who works creatively to engage children and young people in therapy.  Phill also maintains his own private practise alongside offering supervision and professional development and learning to other therapists.

Phill ‘s background as a therapist includes working with vulnerable children within maintained and independent special schools and specialist units schools.  Managing and delivering therapy services to a wide range of students with needs ranging from complex trauma and neurodiverse conditions involving leadership in safeguarding in the context of complex safeguarding and multi-agency arrangements.

Phill has a passion and strong belief that all children and young people should have the best start in life, and that they can access the appropriate therapy and safeguarding services to ensure this can happen.

Camilla Read, School Nurse, Lord Wandsworth College

Camilla is a school nurse at the independent boarding school, Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire where for the last 6 years she has specialised in sports injuries, eating disorders and pupil vaping support. Prior to joining the college Camilla had a varied nursing careers, spending a year Nursing in Nepal, then worked in the Emergency Departments at the Chelsea and Westminster and the North Hampshire Hospital, where she was a sister and worked as an Emergency Nurse Practitioner. Camilla returned to ED during the pandemic and then subsequently joined the covid vaccination team in Basingstoke. She still works as a bank nurse in ED at North Hampshire Hospital. Camilla graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a BSc (hons) in Adult Nursing in 2002, is married and has three children.

Rebecca Thomson, Partnership Manager, Tellmi App

Rebecca Thomson is partnership manager of Tellmi. She is passionate about supporting young people’s mental health and the importance of regulated, evidence based mental health tools.

Sarah Ashworth, Schools and Families Program Director, Charlie Waller Trust

Sarah Ashworth is Director of Schools and Families Programmes and a member of the Charlie Waller team delivering consultancy and training in colleges and universities. Sarah holds professional qualifications in counselling and psychotherapy, nutritional therapy and coaching. She is a Registered and Accredited Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) a Member of the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine (BANT), and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Over the last 30 years, Sarah has worked with a wide variety of individuals and groups, particularly children and young people. Prior to joining Charlie Waller, she led a multidisciplinary team as Head of Mental Health at the University of Warwick. Sarah continues to work in private practice and teaches counselling related and psychopathology modules at the University of Warwick and the University of Oxford.

A highly experienced mental health practitioner and educator, Sarah’s passion is supporting others to understand the multitude of biological, psychological and sociological factors which influence mental health and wellbeing, providing training and interventions to facilitate wellbeing on an individual and collective level.

Andrew Wright, Former Boarding School, Deputy Head and DSL, Speaker for Action Your Potential

Andrew has spent 30 years working in 5 secondary schools in the UK and abroad. He has been a headteacher, a designated safeguarding lead for a large 1500 student secondary school, and he is a trained SENDCO. Andrew trained as a biologist 35 years ago at the Uni of London and he is passionate about helping children, parents and carers understand the incredible power of the human brain. A lifelong passion for brain science saw Andrew found Action Your Potential in 2018, they now work in over 150 schools and support 3000 students in 2021-22 to improve their mental health and unleash their learning. Andrew has an MA in education, and he is currently studying for an MSc in Neuroscience at King’s College.

Action Your Potential’s mission is nothing short of bringing about a revolution in our education system, to ensure every child learns about their amazing brain so they can live inside understanding how it works and how to get the best out of it every day.

Amelia Baron, Anorexia survivor

Amelia Baron is originally from Blackburn, Lancashire, and now resides in Leeds after graduating from Leeds Arts University in 2018. During her adolescence, Amelia spent lengthy stays in hospital due to ill mental health. By applying her interest in art and poetry, Amelia utilised these passions as a cathartic tool for recovery and a means of communication with family and friends. Amelia’s practice combines endurance performance, installation and spoken word in an attempt to visualise the chaos of the mind and to open up a discourse surrounding mental health in contemporary society. Often using delicate materials and repetitive motions, Amelia’s work can take a metaphorical stance on the fragility and vulnerability of mental wellbeing. A prize winner at the Aon Community Art Awards 2019 and recently shortlisted for the 2020 Government Art Collection, she hopes to continue supporting her contemporaries and engaging with the community through means of social art and performance.

Katrin Viella, Head of Training Academy – Govox Wellbeing

Katrin is an experienced mental health consultant and senior mental health trainer with an academic background in business and clinical psychology. She initially started out in cross-cultural leadership development and then gained experience in the clinical field working with people with most complex and severe, enduring mental illness. Combining her training background and clinical experience she then specialised in mental health training. She established and led a fully accredited Mental Health Training Academy for the charity ‘Mind’. Her training division delivered therapeutic counselling qualifications, whole school approaches and whole organisation mental health programs in various organisations. Over the years Katrin has trained headmasters, GPs, A&E staff, education professionals, senior executives, middle managers and staff across all sectors and different industries. She is also a licensed and highly rated MHFA and Youth MHFA trainer and has trained hundreds of MHFAs. Her expertise lies in safe implementation strategies for these support networks. Katrin now works as an Associate Consultant and Trainer with some of the largest national and global organisations on mental health culture change programs embedding prevention, earliest intervention, and crisis support. Katrin is also an expert in workplace suicide prevention and cross-cultural mental health aspects. She is an advocate for earliest intervention, post-traumatic growth and de-medicalisation of mental health approaches.