Leeds City College

Creating a culture of wellbeing and working towards removing the stigma associated with mental health is vital for providing students with the confidence to ask for help.

For more than five years, we have has been jointly working with the MindMate Support Team (MMST), an early intervention emotional wellbeing service for children and young people up to the age of 19.

Part of the national Mental Health Support Team Trailblazer Pilot, MMST’s services are provided by Leeds Community Healthcare (LCH) and are delivered in partnership with educational settings such as ours.

A whole setting approach

The partnership sees MMST working alongside our in-house wellbeing team to help staff provide direct interventions across our campus including coping with anxiety, understanding low mood and guided self-help for eating difficulties.

It has played a key role in enabling a college wide approach to be embedded into our operations, providing training in areas including mental health awareness, managing stress, and staff wellbeing, alongside many other workshops ranging from mindfulness techniques to promoting healthy sleep. We are also able to make use of MMST workbooks and other resources.

Through this approach we ensure that students are supported effectively from the first contact we have with them. With a focus on early intervention and wellbeing support, we respond to student referrals in a timely manner, provide information, and signpost and facilitate external referrals to relevant services, to ensure students receive specialist support where required.

Increasing our team’s capabilities

Our partnership has been transformational in how we provide mental health and wellbeing services to our students and has made a really positive impact across our teams.

MMST’s specialist expertise and knowledge has been used to train and upskill staff and has helped to build capacity within the Leeds City College wellbeing team by providing direct one to one and group support on topics such as anxiety, low mood, exam stress and worry management.

CPD opportunities have been provided and staff have been upskilled on emotional and mental health topics alongside providing resources and information that can be used for PSHE sessions.

Workbooks have been used by the college’s counselling and mental health officers in their sessions and are available to all college staff to use.

Partnership approach

The teams work collaboratively to ensure that individual students are provided with the best support for their needs. This might be one of our in-house counsellors or a dedicated MMST practitioner.

Thanks to our positive and long-standing partnership we have jointly developed a triage process, completed departmental and college-wide mental health and wellbeing audits, shared resources with pastoral staff and delivered training and workshops to staff and students.

Positive impact

Through working with MMST over a long period we have been able to reach more students and provide a wider option of mental health support.

For example, between August and November 2023, our wellbeing team saw the number of self-referrals almost double to more than 100 compared to the previous three months. The number of referrals made by a professional jumped by more than 50 to 178.

In the same period referrals by 14 to 16 year olds increased by 40% while those from 17 to 18 year olds jumped by more than 50%. We also saw referrals by minority ethnic groups positively increase.

Feedback from students we have supported has been positive, with individual members of the team being described as “amazing” and others being thanked and appreciated for their help.