My Oasis is fully committed to supporting the mental health and wellbeing of its staff, students and their families, having various policies and procedures in place which we adhere to.

Promoting positive mental health and wellbeing is essential for cultivating a mentally healthy school, for retaining and motivating staff, as well as for promoting student wellbeing and attainment. We consider mental health as being all about our holistic health, including both our physical and emotional health given how they are both interlinked with each other.

At My Oasis we understand how stretched most education staff are, therefore supporting staff’s mental health and wellbeing is one of our main priorities to ensure they can in turn, support our young people. We encourage staff to maintain a strict work/life balance to facilitate them feeling more motivated and engaged within their job role. In addition, ensuring staff are mentally well at work has been shown to increase job satisfaction, improve performance, reduce staff turnover, as well as reduce absence rates. Subsequently, at My Oasis and through the services offered to schools, we offer individual and group therapeutic support, as well as supervision to school staff to help support them with their mental health and wellbeing.

We recognise that for many young people the school environment can cause them a great deal of anxiety for a variety of reasons. Most of the young people referred to us at My Oasis not only struggle with anxiety around attending school, but they often present with complex mental health difficulties which we have frequently found to be associated with being absent from education for so long. At My Oasis we understand how ‘no one approach fits all’, which is why we offer such an eclectic range of psychotherapies, interventions and counselling approaches to support staff, students and their parents/carers. We deliver various groups within the provision which help young people to develop coping strategies to manage their mental health and wellbeing on a long-term basis, such as skills-based groups based around the principles of CBT. This is in addition to the weekly wellbeing mentoring sessions students are provided with, as well as the one-to-one therapy or counselling sessions if these are part of a student’s plan. Similarly, mental health and wellbeing is heavily weighted upon within the RHSE and personal development curriculum delivered to students in line with a whole-school approach to supporting mental health.

Please see our Mental health Resources section for further information and advice regarding a variety of mental health issues for both young people as well as parents and carers.