Mindfulness in British Schools
Children and young people spend a large proportion of their time in education, particularly during their school years. Increasing the availability of mental health and wellbeing support in schools can benefit children and young people in myriad ways. For example, teaching mindfulness in schools can help to reduce stress and anxiety, enable children and teenagers to manage difficulties and enhance their learning capabilities. An increasing number of schools in the UK are introducing mindfulness and both pupils and teachers are benefitting from this approach.
Calmer Classrooms is the brainchild of Kate Beddow, a primary and secondary school teacher who had to make a career change due to her health. Kate was diagnosed with a brain tumour and acromegaly, a rare hormonal condition that causes ongoing issues with fatigue. While looking at ways to focus on her wellbeing, Kate found mindfulness was particularly beneficial. After training as a mindfulness therapist, a chance conversation with a teacher at her daughter’s school led to the idea of creating Calmer Classrooms. The teacher wanted to introduce mindfulness to her class but didn’t know how to go about it and asked Kate if she could come up with a solution. The rest is history!
In the first instance, Kate created a range of MP3 resources via her musician husband’s recording studio. There’s also Calmer Classrooms with Mojo, a daily mindfulness and wellbeing programme. This was created for the primary school age range (4-11), but it can be adapted for any age group. Meditation with Mojo is Calmer Classroom’s whole school meditation programme and more recently, Kate has launched Mindful Moments with Mojo for after school club use. This is suitable for any age range.
“Mojo the elephant is named after my grandparents who were very mindful,” explains Kate. “Also, elephants never forget so the aim with Mojo is to provide a gentle reminder to children to be more mindful. After practising mindfulness in the classroom, one little girl spotted that her grandad was stressed and promptly offered to do some breathing with him!”
Calmer Classrooms also offers a Wellbeing Week resource pack for primary schools. Each day focuses on a different area of wellbeing. There’s Meditation Monday, Take a Breath Tuesday, Wake Up Your Body Wednesday, Thoughtful Thursday and Get That Friday Feeling. Each day, children carry out a 5-10 minute activity or exercise to support their wellbeing. Kate also offers individual lesson plans around popular stories and topics that can be used to introduce or reinforce mindfulness techniques. These include yoga poses, breathing techniques and mindfulness tools that are built into the script. Children carry out the exercises as the teacher reads the story.
“One of the most beneficial aspects about teaching mindfulness in schools is that when children learn these techniques at a young age, they keep and use these skills automatically throughout their lives,” Kate adds. “Learning mindfulness in nursery, for example, could support a young person’s wellbeing into adulthood and help to calm their nerves ahead of A level exams or their first job interview.”
For Carmel Farnan, a deep interest in mindfulness from being a teenager led to her training as a psychotherapist and starting her own practice. After setting up the Irish Mindfulness Academy, she later trained in psychology in order to understand the function of the mind. In 2013, she launched the British Mindfulness Academy in response to the demand for her programmes in the UK.
Carmel had begun to notice that an increasing number of referrals were for stress and anxiety in children. In response to this, she created the Mindfulness for Wellbeing in Schools programme (a six-week online programme) for primary and secondary school use. What surprised Carmel was the response she received from teachers to her programme. “The teachers were so in need of this themselves and they always say that it has helped them so much, not just professionally but personally too,” Carmel explains. “The children are so open to it and even with teenagers who may have developed unhelpful thinking styles, these are not embedded deeply in their minds. It’s very easy to reverse them out of that and this is why you get very, very quick results with both children and teenagers.”
As young children have shorter attention spans, different techniques are used to what would work best for teenagers. For example, toys can be introduced to help with breathing exercises. “With young children, you can get them to place a teddy bear on their tummy while they practice deep breathing,” Carmel explains. “The child’s focus would be on watching the bear move up and down, whereas a teenager isn’t going to be remotely interested in that. But there are common techniques that work for both younger and older children such as meditation for worry. This would be called a worry train meditation for younger children and there would be a different version for teenagers. With young children, you need to introduce more of a moving kind of mindfulness and going outdoors for a mindful walk can work especially well. By tuning into your five senses (feel, smell, sound, taste and touch) during a 20-minute walk, it can really help to bring your attention to the present moment. Young children are just brilliant at walking mindfully.”
“The aim for everyone with mindfulness is just to be more present in their lives,” Carmel adds. “Research shows that we’re missing from our lives around 50% of the time because we’re up in our heads, particularly at the moment with all the stress we have with the Covid-19 pandemic. If you can increase the amount of time that children and teenagers can pay attention for, they are going to do better academically because they will have more mind power available.”
As part of the course, teachers are asked to advise children and teenagers to practice their breathing before they go to bed. This has a positive knock-on effect of encouraging their parents and grandparents to join in with mindful breathing. “It’s really popular with children and they do ask their loved ones to breathe with them. Surrounding children and young people with mindfulness helps to reduce stress for everyone.”