Student using a mood meter at Ark Charter Academy’s Jonathan Centre
Responding to growing concerns around mental health and young people, Ark works both with individual schools and through partnerships at a network level – such as our partnership with Place2Be – to create mentally healthy schools.
From supporting school leaders and safeguarding leads with training so they can identify issues as early as possible, to specialist one-to-one provision with partner organisations, Ark schools are seeking to establish a whole school approach to mental health.
I honestly don’t think we could have improved the way we have without our focus on mental health. It’s made our progress deep, genuine and thorough. You’re building relationships and trust between children and adults, which allows them to grow and develop as human beings, not just pass exams.
Rebecca Curtis Principal at Ark Elvin Academy
The power of working with Ark is that we share our learning across the system. We want to lead the conversation about what works best, as well as what doesn’t, to help the system tackle this enormous challenge. Our ‘embed, innovate, share’ model will spread our learnings in mental health beyond Ark schools.