Mental Health+
Mental Health+ helps vocational education and training (VET) organisations, as well as schools in general, become ‘mental health positive’ by ensuring that they adequately support the mental health of their students and staff. This is being achieved through the development of a series of resources that will help VET organisations improve their mental health provision.
Project end and official launch of the outputs
As the Mental Health+ Project comes to an end this month, we wanted to remind you that the resources produced during the project life cycle are free to access for all VET organisations, career guidance centres and other similar providers that are interested.
The first project output saw the development of:
• A MH+ Charter, which outlines the minimum requirements an organisation should adhere to in order to be mental health inclusive.
• An eBook, with country-specific information around mental health and best practices which you can incorporate into your organisation.
• A European report into mental health inclusion.
For the second output, the project partners produced the interactive Mental Health+ Benchmarking Tool based on the Charter. This allows you to determine how mental health inclusive your organisation is by answering a series of questions, and it offers advice on how you can improve your mental health inclusivity.
The digital Benchmarking Tool has been piloted by representatives of VET institutions, schools, colleges, career guidance centres and local authorities. We have also developed a Mental Health+ Champion Skills Profile which helps you develop and select a Mental Health lead. As this will be a requirement for all UK schools by 2025, now could be the perfect time to start assessing your mental health provision, and to dedicate a member of staff to lead on incorporating these changes.
Aspire-igen (UK) are the coordinators of this project with partners BFE from Bulgaria, CESIE from Italy, INTRAS Foundation from Spain, Learnmera from Finland and Hugarafl from Iceland.
To read more about the project partners, visit the project website.
To find out more, read our blog post and visit our website:
www.mentalhealthplus.eu
Transnational Meetings
We have held four transnational meetings that allowed us to discuss the progress of each output in detail and for us to planning of related events. Our first meeting took place in Valladolid, Spain and focused on the first output, as well as ensuring that everyone had the same understanding of the scope, aims and impacts of the project.
Our second, third and fourth meetings were also supposed to take place in person (in Iceland, Bulgaria and Italy), but were instead held online due to travel restrictions imposed in each of our countries due to COVID-19. The remote aspect had no bearing on the success of the meetings or the progress of the project and we finalised the first output documents, which can be found here, the Benchmarking Tool and the Skills Profile of the Mental Health Champion.
The project is financed by Erasmus+ KA2: 2019-1-UK01-KA202-062036