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"It's not our children who are disordered, it's the environment in which we're expecting them to operate."
In this month’s episode, our experts explore the pressing issue of children's mental health in the UK. With one in five young individuals facing probable mental health disorders, the urgency for effective support systems is undeniable.
Joining the conversation are Kate Silverton, renowned broadcaster turned qualified child therapist, and Professor Nicola Walshe, a proponent of climate change and sustainability education. Together, they dissect the challenges faced by schools and parents in supporting children's mental health and the innovative ways to foster well-being through nature and the arts.
Kate Silverton shares her insights on the variability of mental health support in schools and the critical need for standardised, professionally trained mental health professionals on-site. She emphasises the importance of understanding the neuroscience behind children's behaviour and offers a sneak peak of some of the practical, science-backed strategies found in her latest book, ‘There’s still no such thing as naughty: parenting for the primary years’.
Professor Nicola Walshe discusses her work with the UCL Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education, highlighting the transformative power of combining arts with nature to improve children's mental and emotional well-being. She presents compelling evidence from the Eco-Capabilities project, illustrating how such practices not only benefit the students but also reinvigorate teachers' passion for their profession.
This episode is an impassioned call to disrupt the status quo of public health and education systems, advocating for a holistic approach that prioritises emotional well-being and connection to nature as the foundation for learning and growth.
Public Health Disrupted with Rochelle Burgess and Xand van Tulleken is produced by UCL Health of the Public, and edited by Annabelle Buckland at Decibelle Creative / @decibelle_creative
Creators and Guests
What is Public Health Disrupted?
Presented by Doctor, writer and TV Presenter Xand van Tulleken and community health psychologist and self-proclaimed hippie, UCL's Professor Rochelle Burgess.
This podcast is about public health, but more importantly, it’s about the systems that need disrupting to make public health better. In each episode, we’ll be challenging the status quo of this field, asking what needs to change, why and how to get there. We’ll be joined by activists, scholars, artists, comedians and industry professionals to offer perspectives from the UCL community and beyond.
We’re calling this podcast Public Health Disrupted because that’s exactly what we want to do. We are going to be breaking down disciplinary, sectoral and geographic boundaries to really understand the diverse and complex issues impacting our health.
Hello, and welcome to season four of Public Health Disrupted with me, Xand van Tulleken, and my cohost Rochelle Burgess. Now I'm a doctor, a writer, and a TV presenter. And Rochelle is a community health psychologist and associate professor at the UCL Institute for Global Health. This podcast is about public health. More importantly, it's about the systems that need disrupting to make public health better.
Xand van Tulleken:So join us each month as we challenge the status quo of the public health field, asking what needs to change and why and how to get there. Recent research by NHS England discovered that one in five children and young people in England aged eight to 25 had a probable mental health disorder in 2023, and that is a concerning statistic that highlights the immense pressures young people are facing today. So in this episode, our experts are gonna dive into the current state of children's mental health in The UK. We're gonna chat about the challenges schools and parents are up against and explore the support available. And we're gonna try and uncover some innovative ways that schools are supporting children's well-being and the links between nature, arts, and mental health.
Xand van Tulleken:So our first guest today is Kate Silverton, renowned broadcaster and journalist. She's covered conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. She's rubbed shoulders with Hollywood's finest on the red carpet at the Oscars. She's shone bright as one of the stars on Strictly Come Dancing. And in 2020, she made a courageous career shift, returning to academic roots in child psychology.
Xand van Tulleken:She's now a qualified child therapist. Kate is dedicated to supporting families and parents. And her latest book, There's Still No Such Thing as Naughty, Parenting the Primary Years, continues from her first book, which was a Sunday Times bestseller. It offers groundbreaking advice to parents navigating the challenges of primary school parenting for children aged five to 12. And I have to say, I'm very excited this is coming out because we have a baby on the way.
Xand van Tulleken:And, I think five to 12 is gonna be with us before we know it.
Rochelle Burgess:We're also delighted to welcome our second guest, professor Nicola Walsh. Nicola holds the position of pro director of education at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, where she oversees educational initiatives. Additionally, she serves as the Co Founder and Executive Director of the UCL Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education. The Centre aims to enhance climate change and sustainability education in schools through free professional development for teachers supported by rigorous research. Nicholas spearheads two projects, Eco Capabilities and Branching Out, which explore how arts and nature practices fosters children's environmental connection and well-being.
Rochelle Burgess:A huge welcome, Kate and Nicola. Thank you so much for being here today.
Xand van Tulleken:Kate, can I start with you? Drawing from your experience as a children's counsellor working closely with young children, including those with high needs, can you share a bit of insight into the support systems available to schools and the challenges they encounter?
Kate Silverton:Sure. Lovely to be here, by the way. Hello to everybody. It can vary greatly from school to school and dependent on what money is available. Schools will generally have mental health support teams, teachers, part of the support system.
Kate Silverton:As we know, you've got camps, charities. I work and have I volunteer for organizations such as Unlocking Potential. And so essentially the school will direct some of their resources to either go towards a charity, Place2Be is another one, Jana Freud Centre, others. And then someone like me would come in and there'll be different levels. When I first started training, I went in as a volunteer to support children one to one therapeutically.
Kate Silverton:And I've stayed on in that role volunteering still. So offering my services for free, you know, once sort of got past the qualification stage. And you've also got lots of other tools for schools, sort of EBSA, emotionally based school avoidance tools, lots of different. I think my short answer, because I'm going to stop myself because there are a lot. But my short answer is my sense is it's actually varies so much that we don't have one standardized system.
Kate Silverton:And the challenges at the moment are immense, absolutely immense. And what's ending up, what we're ending up with is teachers who have a job to do And the ratio of teacher one to often 30 in the classroom are often also picking up the emotional. I mean, they are there to support children emotionally, of course, but they have a myriad of things that they need to be doing. And a ratio of one to 30 is just not feasible. So the short answer is that we need a rallying cry to disrupt the system and get a lot more support in.
Kate Silverton:And if it were me sitting here, I would be wanting to have a professionally sort of clinically trained mental health professionals in every single school and to standardise the support that we're the offerings that we're that we're giving.
Xand van Tulleken:And the sense I'm getting is that we are a very, very long way from that. Is that right? I mean, how many schools would have a train do we even have a grasp of what the sort of coverage is overall or what typical coverage would be? Or does it vary that much?
Kate Silverton:I can only speak from my experience, and it's not very much. I mean, obviously I've worked within schools, but I'm also asked to go in and speak at schools and very, very few. What tends to sometimes happen is that we have a mental health offering, but actually it's not standardised and it's not. I'd want someone who's a mental health professional in there doing it because otherwise I think it can get very the messaging can get very confused. But a lot of these children will benefit from one to one support.
Kate Silverton:And currently, we just don't have the resources for that.
Rochelle Burgess:Nicola, I wonder if you could jump in on that because I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Nicola Walsh:Yeah, absolutely. And thank you Again, it's a pleasure to be here. Completely agree with Kate. Schools are increasingly being required to fill this gap in mental health services, particularly for children and young people, but for all people actually, but with very little resources to do so. So there's mental health support teams, or a new workforce of educational mental health practitioners who do aim or answer that they were brought about to fill this gap.
Nicola Walsh:But the latest figures I've got, which were from twenty two-twenty three, so a little bit out of date now, but only 28% of schools at that point and colleges. So that's about 6,800 schools and colleges were covered by a mental health support team. That's about 35% of our pupils. And actually, I would suggest that even those schools that do have these teams, it's still not sufficient because of the hugely increasing almost exponentially, which is very worrying. I'm a sort of mother of three as well as a professional.
Nicola Walsh:So it's just isn't being addressed in the way that we need it to be. I would also say the response that school that schools are having to make is very interventionist. So it's very reactive. So at the moment, their whole system is trying to react to this crisis of mental health of young people. It's not preventative.
Nicola Walsh:So we're not able to even sort of get our breath to start to think about how we can adjust, change, shift education systems to prevent these things from happening in the first place.
Rochelle Burgess:Yeah. I mean, that was going to be a follow on question I had around that. Guess an easy way to think about some of the work that I do is in public mental health. Increasingly, I've been doing stuff in the space of young people's mental health, particularly around like minoritized young people. And a huge part of how we think about mental health supports in historically marginalized communities and underfunded councils and things like that feels like it needs a lot of structural attention.
Rochelle Burgess:So the things that fall under classic public mental health kind of stuff as well. And I just wondered, Nicola and Kate, what your thoughts were on the importance of that and sort of if we're thinking about redoing the system, how important is that piece to the whole picture?
Nicola Walsh:I mean, I would say obviously in my position, but education is a hugely important piece of that system. We have integrated care systems, which do start to think about mental health more broadly across society. But education as it is at the moment isn't a huge piece of that integrated care system puzzle. So I would argue that actually we need to think of schools and properly resource and fund them as a really important part, a piece in the puzzle that is going only by supporting schools to address this alongside other interventions. So in a preventative way, we going to be able to start to do anything about it?
Nicola Walsh:But at the moment, we just haven't got that joined up across the whole system to be able to do that.
Kate Silverton:There is a lot of hope as well. And and I think in tandem exactly with what Nicola has just been saying, there's a lot of things that we can do. I work with children very often who do have high and complex need. And what so what were they doing? They're coming in what I call fizzy.
Kate Silverton:So, you know, the most primitive parts of their brain are in survival mode. And when we understand that children who are in survival mode, when they're in fight flight, when their stress response has been triggered, they cannot learn. They cannot sit still. They want to they're either in fight flight or freeze. They're under a table somewhere in complete faint.
Kate Silverton:So actually, what I found with the teachers I work with and parents that I work with is that when we understand the science of behavior, we can start thinking, what can we do to regulate children, to bring them back to balance? So actually, if I give you one example and I'm seeing it actually increasing in schools. And by the way, I'm not saying this is like a stick in plaster, by the way, Nicola, in terms of what you were just saying. There's a lot that needs to change. But in terms of the small steps that can help us to get to a better place, things and I'm seeing them in school dancing before two minutes of dancing at registration time with a little bit of funny music and happy music, especially for younger children is a brilliant way for bringing that nervous system a little bit and shaking out the energy of the stress response.
Kate Silverton:I've seen teachers doing Tai Chi. I have seen colleagues who have children who are in emergency foster care who turn up at the gate extremely dysregulated, five minutes on the monkey bars and doing an obstacle course in the playground. And that child is ready to engage and re engage. When we understand the brain and that it's impossible to engage the prefrontal cortex while our brain stem and nervous system are firing. When we understand that we can start thinking, okay, so how am I going to get this class working in a much more regulated way?
Kate Silverton:So I'm not saying it's a cure all by any stretch, but there are things that we can do and we can be helped by science. And I think when teachers understand that, they can start feeling a bit more empowered to think, do you know what, five minutes of fun time is going to help my entire class sit and focus for that bit longer rather than having a lot of dysregulation.
Xand van Tulleken:It's actually amazing to hear you say that because it feels like intuitively giving children a bit of room to run around, giving them time to run around, time to be active. We all benefit from that.
Kate Silverton:I think sometimes being given permission. This is why when I talk about standardization is just actually give teachers to say, do you know what, this is science, this is not a nice to have, You know, this is actually when we understand the nervous system and the neurobiology of this, what we're saying is shaking it out. You know, we're the only animals that have lost our ability to shake out our stress, that and zoo animals. So we have all the research, but I just don't think it's translated just yet. And I mean, that's what I put in my books to make it really accessible for parents to have.
Kate Silverton:But I think the more we can get it into the wider education, then it's just got to be we've just got to find more ways to support teachers because they're drowning very often and it's fair.
Rochelle Burgess:Nicola, do you want to jump in on any of that?
Nicola Walsh:I suppose just to say, I think I completely agree with everything that Kate said. There's there's a real challenge in many schools, and it tends to be schools that are kind of in an off state category that they don't want to be in where that you wouldn't have thought how Kate has just described it is risk taking. But for some schools, would see that as risk taking, because actually, with increases in challenging behaviour, what they tend and sort of accountability of, you know, what's the next stats results or GCSE results or whatever, and sort of all of that pressure on, they tend to kind of clamp down and become more and more kind of behaviour focused, which again, policy is around the focus of behavior, clamp down on behavior, you know, it's all about learning. But Kate's absolutely right that unless you create the situation and the environment in which that learning can take place, it's all wasted. But it's so difficult.
Nicola Walsh:Schools get in a cycle of, as I say, high accountability, high pressure, and only really the bravest head teachers facilitate teachers to be able to do that in their classrooms and take what shouldn't be, but really are seen as risks because they're doing something a little bit different.
Kate Silverton:So, Nicola, what we need to do, Rochelle and Xand is we need to say to the policymakers, where is your evidence base for focusing on that extra five minutes on times tables compared with the evidence base that is there? We've got the evidence for it to show that five minutes invested in getting all the stress energy out and finding love and connecting with the children in the class as well. Let's not forget when we're doing this play music art, which I know we're talking about today, it strengthens the connection to the teacher. I always say with parents, you know, you've got to connect before you can command. And it's the same in the classroom as well.
Kate Silverton:So all of this stuff is a no brainer, pardon the pun.
Xand van Tulleken:So Kate sort of beautifully described, you both described this sort of almost emotional state that the brain is in, how hard that makes it to teach, the role of immediate interventions, which which probably many of us would have experienced personally in terms of helping people regulate those behaviours. Can you talk a bit more though, Nicola, about nature, arts and mental health? Those those other kind of structural things that might be built in and what what the evidence base is around those areas?
Nicola Walsh:Absolutely. Yeah. I suppose the impact of nature and outdoor environments on health and well-being more broadly, including of children and young people is relatively widely evidenced. So in 2020, the people in nature survey showed children who spend more time outside and more time noticing nature are more likely to report that being in nature makes them very happy, for example. And there's also a lot of evidence from more than 3,000 studies globally that arts play a major role in the prevention of ill health, promotion of health and health management, so through advanced therapy right across the lifespan, so children, young people into adulthood.
Nicola Walsh:And then within schools in particular, research suggests that arts education can improve well-being and social inclusion and learning, etc. But what's received relatively little attention to date in the literature is the combination of the two. So, the arts and the nature, and what happens and what is the kind of complementary value, if you like, of both of them together. And it's for this reason that we developed our eco capabilities project that you mentioned at the beginning, by the AHRC. And that was really situated at the intersection of three issues.
Nicola Walsh:So the first is the sharp rise in children and young people's mental health challenges, which we've already sort of referred to quite extensively. And I mean, I will add to that, that it was only a few weeks ago, it was reported that the number of children referred to emergency mental health care in England has soared by more than fifty percent in three years. So that's over 32,000 emergency and urgent referrals to children and adolescent mental health services in twenty twenty two-twenty twenty three. So this is a really significant issue, which we already know, but I just I I'm so shocked when I see these figures that I feel like we need to say them again to make sure people are listening. So that was the first issue.
Nicola Walsh:The second is around societal disconnect from nature. So despite what we know about the benefits of nature connectedness, the Natural Childhood Report found that in the last thirty years, the number of children regularly playing outdoors in The UK fell by 90%. And we know that children living with high deprivation are nine times less likely to have access to green spaces. So this is even worse for them. Have sort of concepts such as green poverty, where children from areas of high deprivation don't have access to those spaces.
Nicola Walsh:So that then knocks on and creates worse mental health well-being issues. And then the third issue was a school curriculum that fails to draw on its sort of cultural natural assets. So the arts are increasingly marginalised in school curricula. And again, we know that individuals with low socioeconomic status have less access to the arts than their more affluent counterparts. So Eco capabilities as a project was to address these three challenges really, and to explore how the mental health and well-being of children, particularly those living in areas of high deprivation can be supported through arts in nature practice.
Nicola Walsh:And the arts in nature practice we worked particularly with was developed by an arts and well-being charity called Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, or CCI, and what they term artscaping. And it goes a little bit beyond sort of traditional forms of art. So it's not just drawing, it's more experiential in its connection with nature. So it includes foliage inspired collages, or there might be some observational drawings, sculpting, music, stories, performance, and they can take place anywhere outside. You don't have to have green leafy spaces or forests, so it can be anything just within the school grounds.
Nicola Walsh:If you look up, you've got nature above you, even if you're not sort of within a leafy area. And the key thing about it with these artists is that art making happens alongside reflections and conversations that help children sort of connect with and feel part of that nature. So it's the arts, with the nature both really, really important. And through the project, the children in areas of high deprivation in East Anglia were provided with eight full days of arts in nature experiences. So again, talking about risk taking, the head teachers who allowed us to go in and take a day a week for eight weeks off timetable to engage with the activities were really very brave.
Nicola Walsh:But through the study, we found that through these experiences, these sort of day a week children developed what we called eco capabilities. So skills, competencies, things that changed in them. And this were things like improved mental and emotional well-being, so they were able to talk about and express their emotions more. Yes, they might have been sad at times, but they were able to articulate and talk about that sadness, which is just as important. It's not all about being super happy all the time.
Nicola Walsh:They also started to develop more autonomy, so having ownership or agency over their time in schools. And I'm going to give you a couple of quotes because I love drawing on some of the quotes. My research is always quite qualitative. So talking to the children, talking to the teachers, and one of the teachers said, the confidence of some of them really blossomed outside, some of them who in the classroom won't lead activities or suggest answers to questions. When we were doing the activities, you could observe them taking on a lead role in group work or showing someone else how to do something.
Nicola Walsh:That was a remarkable change in some of them for their well-being and self esteem. We also found that children started to have improved relationships over the course of the sessions, and Kate mentioned this earlier, both with each other, but with the teacher, and stronger relationships with and connection to nature. And in fact, children started to see themselves as part of nature, so they then started to want to take care of it. One child actually said, Remember, we are nature, so we don't destroy it, we take care of it. So they were starting to notice it.
Nicola Walsh:They'd come up to us each week and get really excited about the dragonfly that they've noticed at home. So they started to notice that nature, feel them part of it, and therefore want to take care of it. So they were telling us they felt happier with their life, they were spending more time outdoors, outside of the classroom, and what was happening in the classroom, in the days that we were there, sorry, not in the classroom, outside, was then permeating across the rest of the week. So one of the times, I remember having a conversation with a teacher and saying, well, how are you finding fitting the rest of the curriculum into the four days a week because you're having to squash it? And they said, well, it's it's very difficult.
Nicola Walsh:It's very squashed. And then they sort of reflected and said, but it's always felt really squashed because we never have enough time to fit the curriculum. And actually, what's happening is that the improved relationships, improved engagement by particular areas and particular children means that actually the rest of the week is so much more productive. And for some children, they told us about the fact that they really enjoyed coming to school now because of that day, because of those different ways of being in school. So children who, because of structural reasons, because of anxiety, because of whatever reasons, were finding school really, really difficult, were starting to want to come in.
Nicola Walsh:And yes, that wasn't sort of learning about maths or learning about English, it was doing something different, but that then meant that they could learn about the maths English in a more positive and productive ways throughout the rest of the week. So what I was suggesting, and what I would really strongly argue is that if we work with teachers to support them to engage in practice that is slightly different, slightly perhaps riskier based on as opposed to traditional ways of teaching. But actually, can have massive impact on well-being, but also the learning, which of course is what the schools are measured by throughout the rest of the week.
Rochelle Burgess:Really feels like yeah, I mean, yeah, Kate's clapping. Incidentally, like massive applause. Like in person for these things.
Xand van Tulleken:You have to clap. It's radio effectively. You gotta be gonna make some noise. One can
Kate Silverton:see Literally, I'm sitting on my hands, so excited listening to Nicola.
Rochelle Burgess:Kate, I'm sure you have tons to say in relation to what Nicola has said. And when you do, could you I wonder if you could also reflect on sort of the way in which you think about in your book parents and the family environment sort of can connect into this space as well, because that does feel a bit like how we sort of build these mental health enabling environments around education and well-being.
Kate Silverton:Absolutely. I think what all of this is pointing to, it all feels risk taking. And actually what we're trying to say is actually it's this is where it's at. There was a report 2013, the London School of Economics, and they found the biggest predictor of adult success and life happiness, well-being was not academic achievement. It was, again, emotional and self regulation.
Kate Silverton:Mental health comes from how we manage our stress and how we regulate our emotions. When we take our children back to the core of what it is to be human, as Nicola's just been saying, and when we allow them to be and children should be playing for the majority of the time, young children, especially play is work, boost brain proteins that actually encourage healthy brain development. So when we go back to what it is that we are as humans and allow children sort of that child developmental stage to be naturally engaged, as Nicola's just been saying, we're all in the brain development business when we're raising children, whether we're teachers, parents, carers, kinship carers, whatever. So we've got it to do our job well. We need to go back to nature.
Kate Silverton:We need to have play, creativity, connection. This is work for children. So I think actually it's not really when we're looking at children now and we talk about various disorders, which I have a lot to say on, but it's not really for today. But in terms of disorder, I always say it's not our children who are disordered, it's the environment in which we're expecting them to operate. So again, bringing it back to science, what do we know about the nervous system and how our children, what do they need for their healthy brain development?
Kate Silverton:They need to be in nature. They need to be able to be social and to play and actually to be in charge, have some autonomy. This clamping down at five, you've got to do this, you've got to do that. It's the antithesis of what our children actually need for their health. Sorry, Rochelle, you were asking about parenting, but it's the same message for parenting.
Kate Silverton:I always say to parents, put away the phone, sit. I've got behind me, I've got a whole store of finger paints. And so as a therapist, I work mostly with play and art. Why? Because I'm going deep into a child's unconscious and I can't do that unless they're able to switch this off the prefrontal cortex and actually go deep into that unconscious where anxiety has its origins.
Kate Silverton:When I get, how do I get there? I get there through that magical process called play.
Xand van Tulleken:Can I ask because there are commercial incentives keeping kids sedentary, there are commercial incentives stripping away our ability to access green spaces, to access, outdoor play and so on, whether it's just urban planning and cars or out of town supermarkets or games consoles or so many other things? So where do you, both of you, where do you see the pushback from this?
Nicola Walsh:The way that education is led in this country is very ideological. And the ideology around education at the moment is as we've described it, it's, you know, we're not deliberately going out to harm children and young people. Of course, we're not. But it's it's we have a very knowledge focused curriculum. We have a focus on behavior.
Nicola Walsh:We have results and standards. And I'm not saying that it's any particular government's fault necessarily. It's just the way that we have developed and come to this the circumstances in which we are. The curriculum at the moment is not set up to allow and facilitate these sorts of interventions.
Kate Silverton:Yeah, and it's a great point. I think sometimes the driver and maybe sustainability is the answer, Nicola, because we know, don't we, that as you've just outlined beautifully with that project that I've made a note of, I'd love to catch up with you on that. You know, children don't empathy is caught, not taught. So I. E.
Kate Silverton:What children experience from adults is what they will then go on to project later. What we need, as we know, with the many myriad of challenges that we currently face in the world are children who are going to become adults who can problem solve, who can engage that prefrontal cortex. But they can also what my very good friend, Professor Peter Fornegie, calls mentalization. I can step into the mind of somebody else and actually understand things from their experience. And I want to also help to alleviate suffering.
Kate Silverton:And that goes for another human as much as it does for the world. So if we really are really serious about sustainability and actually looking after our beautiful planet, it's not going to be with learning Pythagoras theorem necessarily. I'm not dismissing that out of hand. I know that our children need education in what we understand as a traditional perspective, but we also want children who are going to grow up to become empathic, compassionate adults who are not riven with anxiety and driven by fight flight, but actually to sit back and go, we've got some serious problems in the world going on, whether it's conflict, whether it's in terms of the world's resources, let's sit back, not come from fight flight and try and whack a mole to stop everything, but actually let's sit back and collaborate. And to do that, the only way we can do that is by raising children who have this self regulation, emotional regulation.
Kate Silverton:So I think my I agree with all the underlying sentiments as well because we've still got policymakers who think that the title of my book, There's No Such Thing as Naughty, is absolutely bonkers. And I show all the science to support that statement. So, you know, all behavior is communication. They think that's absolutely, you know, ludicrous. And I think so where there is a there is a sort of a discussion, a very long overdue discussion with policymakers.
Kate Silverton:Something has to change. And, you know, all of us together, parents have to come from a grassroots to say, hang on, what do my children really need when they come into school? They don't want to be anxious and they keep being repressed and told that they can't go out. I mean, children are state, you know, if you're talking class, you're not allowed to have a break time, you know, off breaks, detentions for nine year olds. Come on.
Kate Silverton:There is another way to be raising our children much more empathically and compassionately, one that is supporting their mental health and supporting our future to have future adults who have good health and problem solving abilities. Sorry, I'm on my soapbox now, but it does. It makes me cross because I'm seeing children in schools who are being repressed and punished and shamed for being children. And it's no longer we have to. This is where we need to change policy.
Nicola Walsh:I think the other thing that if I might jump in to say is it's not working for the education system either anyway, for the adults in it. So we have a teacher recruitment and retention crisis. And a lot of the evidence is pointing towards the fact that one of the things that is causing that is teachers are leaving because they don't have the autonomy in the classroom. And they they don't feel well either. And some of the subsequent project to ACO capabilities branching out was look, we look at actually the impact on the adults as well.
Nicola Walsh:And what we found was the adults feel so much better for it as well. Teachers and teaching assistants in particular were telling us, you know, it gave them kind of a renewed sense of purpose. It reminded them why they'd actually come into teaching in the first place.
Kate Silverton:Absolutely. And can we remunerate them as well, a little better as well? Because I mean, you know, they're doing the most important job in the world. You know, they are in the business of brain development as well as parents, but teachers have this incredibly important job. And yet, A, they're facing an awful lot of pressures, we've said in the classroom with the behaviour issues that can be made so much easier if they had the right support.
Kate Silverton:But can we pay them, please? Can we actually recognise the role that they're doing?
Xand van Tulleken:Kate, can we get a very quick, this is selfishly for me, but can we get a quick parenting hit from you? Can you give us a just a very quick bullet points, like just a little bit of take home going strategies for parents to nurture children's well-being. Give me give me a give me three or five or some quick hit.
Kate Silverton:All right. Well, look, I I talk about so the first book was naught to five, and the second is five to 12. And I talk about the 10 pillars really all begin with C because my own brain likes order. But I think one thing is understand construction of your child's brain. When we understand that our children, they have a stress response that when they get triggered, if the teacher shouted at school today or someone's run up behind them in the playground and hit them, They have what is called a stress response.
Kate Silverton:It can lead to a neurochemical wildfire and then they get really fizzy. And very often they have to sit on that at school. So when parents say to me, but why do I get all the bad behavior? Blaming themselves. And I'm like, actually, that's quite a compliment because what it's telling you is that your child trusts you, that you're the safe space.
Kate Silverton:They can't offload at school. So they're bringing it home. So actually lots of different things. Let me just give you me give SAS. Let's go with SAS.
Kate Silverton:So SAS is that when your child's in the middle of a stress response, whether they're three and throwing themselves down on the supermarket floor or they're 13 and sort of the equivalent of beating their chest and telling you to go away and know certain terms. Say what you see, acknowledge and soothe. So S is for say, say what you see. So it's kind of naming that emotion, which you're all completely familiar with. You know, we know that.
Kate Silverton:But if I was talking to, let's say a three year old, it's like, sweetheart, you are really cross right now. So you've got to go up. You've got to do what we call affect attunement. You've got to go in. Not like, oh, you're really cross.
Kate Silverton:It's like, you are so mad. You are showing me you're mad by stamping your feet. So you go up, say what you see. Name it. You are angry right now because I never got the cereal that you wanted or whatever it is.
Kate Silverton:Acknowledge that not having something, disappointment can cause really big emotions. So acknowledge, I know darling, you really I'm not saying that we don't have boundaries in parenting, by the way. This is I talk about it a lot. I'm not going to give my child the cereal they wanted just because they wanted it. But it's really hard.
Kate Silverton:I know darling, it's so painful when we don't get, I know, come on sweetheart. And that soothing is what actually our nervous system speaks to our children's nervous system and brings them. This is how we bring a child down. We regulate them with our tone and with our body language and then soothe. So SAS, say what you see, acknowledge the upset.
Kate Silverton:You are really cross. You're really happy. We want to acknowledge all emotions. We want to soothe. Our children cannot regulate their emotions alone.
Kate Silverton:Their prefrontal cortex is not done until we're in our twenties. Right? And that's the bit of the brain that is the regulating bit. So when our whether they're three or even 13, when our children experience emotions, they're big and it can see that equivalent of what I call the baboon behavior. So what we have to do is lend our calm, not join the chaos.
Kate Silverton:And how do we do that? We loan them what I call the wise owl, the prefrontal cortex. So we have to be the calm that brings them down. But we're not going to do it by dismissing or denying their experience. It is hard if I'm three and I don't really understand why I can't get frosties because they've got loads of sugar on them and my mom wants to go and get the porridge oats instead.
Kate Silverton:I don't get that. I'm just three, right? My brain is not in that state. It just wants that now. But if I can start using my calm, I'm still going to boundary.
Kate Silverton:It doesn't mean to say that I'm going to give in to my child, but I can soothe in the presence of that experience to bring them back. So SAS. I mean, I could share lots more, but I won't go on.
Rochelle Burgess:No. Well, buy the book. Buy the book. Can I?
Kate Silverton:Buy the book.
Rochelle Burgess:Kate, I'm getting goosebumps. You're triggering the hippie in me all over the place. I wanted to ask Nicola if you could give us three gifts or recommendations or tips that you would say you could do it right now within the nuances of this policy space that we are currently living in? You know, what based on sort of the amazing work that's coming out of the the eco capabilities project, what would you say to teachers out there that they could do today or tomorrow?
Nicola Walsh:So I would say to teachers that the national curriculum is there, but you can do so much within the current national curriculum. There's a lot of people talk about how can we change the curriculum and particularly around mental health and well-being, but also climate change and sustainability education, it's the same. There is so much to be done within the current state. So don't wait, don't think you have to wait until the next curriculum or that moves straight away. The second thing is would would be to think about getting your children outside.
Nicola Walsh:Of course, I've talked about a particular arts in nature practice, there are plenty of resources around that CCI, Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination have to support teachers and young people on their website so that they can be accessed really quickly. We've written guides and all sorts of things, videos, webinars. But even without that, because I know teachers are very busy, just getting the children outside thinking about different ways to do the English, do the maths, go outside, do those sorts of activities outside. And it will just be transformational in terms of the way that children engage with content and engage with you as an individual, and then relationships that move forward. The third thing I would say is be brave in whatever you are doing.
Nicola Walsh:Don't feel that you have to be quiet. If you've got ideas about creative pedagogies, about ways of doing things differently within the classroom, be brave, do them, try small, small little things will lead to big changes within your classroom. And you can still achieve what is required of you through all these accountability structures that we've talked about, by being different.
Xand van Tulleken:We have a final question that we ask everyone who comes on the show. And we want to know about what's disrupted your thinking.
Kate Silverton:I love this question. Yes, I was thinking less about so in as much as not disrupting me, but enhancing. So there's the neuroscience. When I learned the neuroscience, when I became a parent and I was passionate and I understood the neuroscience, suddenly everything about my children made sense. So that's what started my journey because suddenly I understood them in ways so much quicker and easier than I thought.
Kate Silverton:So that really did disrupt me.
Rochelle Burgess:Nicola, what is your disruptive piece or your art or your poetry or music?
Nicola Walsh:Was a geography teacher actually many years ago. It was when I was starting to think about how to engage the students in my classes with sustainability that I started to think about kind of more effective ways of teaching and learning, creative pedagogies. And I was put in touch with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, who I've talked about already. And I was thinking about what has been disruptive, what has kind of triggered the way I think about my work and the passion that I have for doing these sorts of projects. And I think it's being with the CCI artists and experiencing their practice.
Nicola Walsh:So particularly in eco capabilities, when I had the absolute privilege to go and spend the full day every week with those artists. It felt like I was part of that kind of therapeutic journey as well. So partly it was sort of going through engaging with the artist experiences, stopping myself and connecting to the natural environment through the senses myself. But also, and perhaps more significantly, it was being alongside them and watching the impact week after week of these experiences on the children. So children that had been really nervous about going outside, becoming more confident, those who were disengaged, suddenly valuing themselves, starting to see joy in school.
Nicola Walsh:And then also the transformational part of the teachers, so watching them see the change in the children, so their eyes being open to other ways of being with children as they witness these same impacts on the relationships and confidence and well-being, and how that spilled over into the rest of the week. So not a piece of art as such, but an arts in nature practice, which has absolutely transformed the way I think about education. So thank you so much to those artists who I still work with.
Xand van Tulleken:I love that. That's so that's so good. We're very grateful to both of you for coming on the show.
Rochelle Burgess:You've been listening to Public Health Disrupted. This episode was presented by me, Rochelle Burgess and Xand van Tulleken, produced by UCL Health of the Public and edited by Annabel Buckland at Decibel Creative. Our huge thanks again to today's brilliant guests, Kate Silverton and Nicola Walsh. If you'd like to hear more of these fascinating discussions from UCL Health of the Public, make sure you've subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss future episodes. Come and discover more online and keep up with the school's latest news, events and research.
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