How to transform schools so that children thrive. A Happy Hour Conversation with Ed Anthony and Charlie Turner

This week's show is with Ed Anthony and Charlie Turner, founders of Mental Wellbeing in Schools. This organisation is dedicated to delivering workshops and coaching sessions to students, parents, staff and teachers around how to access wellbeing via what Ed and Charlie describe as an 'Inside-Out understanding'.

In this week's show, we explore why there is such a high occurrence of mental health problems in children of school age now. Eating disorders, self harm, anxiety, depression, lack of self confidence, and suicidal thoughts have become commonplace, even in children as young as 10 years old. And we then talked about what Ed and Charlie are seeing is at least part of the solution to this problem.

What you'll learn from this episode:

• The level of pressure on children these days is immense - Ed and Charlie see that this is due to pressures from the school which is exacerbated by the lack of true connection with their families and spending huge amounts of time on social media. Their minds are so busy and filled with negative thinking.

• Children today are in a system that's inherently designed to create pressure for them to be different to their natural tendencies, they have so little time and freedom to play, to try things out, to make mistakes, make their own decisions, and to be in nature.  Teachers are under similar levels of pressure and aren't shown how to have wellbeing themselves, let alone do the things that would allow their students to be happy and well.

• Ed and Charlie's work is based on the premise that everybody has innate mental health (they just don't know it yet) and they don't understand how their ability to think affects them. When children feel that Ed and Charlie see them as whole and well, instead of seeing them as their diagnosis or as damaged, it allows them to begin to open up to feeling that way about themselves - from there incredible changes happen.

• Ultimately, the hope for the future is that we can create a culture that's built on a foundation of understanding how children really learn - through their natural curiosity.  Wouldn’t that be a cool thing?