Pupils Get Mental-Health Boost Thanks To New Wellbeing Workshops

SCHOOL-AGE children in England are benefiting from a mental-health boost thanks to a new initiate delivering confidence and wellbeing workshops into schools.
Tackling the rise in anxiety across all ages, these workshops and courses teach children a range of strategies and skills to be more confident and resilient to new situations.
Happy Confident Kids is offering schools across the country a specialised programme of play-based therapy workshops, designed to help children tackle emotional wellbeing issues such as anxiety and low self-esteem.
Delivered by qualified practitioners, the workshops use a variety of neurolinguistic (word-association) exercises and games, to teach children confidence-building techniques that they can take away with them and use in the classroom and at home.
Co-founders, Nikki Emerton (48) and Laura Dumbleton-Jones (38), said: 
“We noticed we were seeing more and more children and teenagers in our individual practices presenting with anxiety, low self-esteem and low confidence. This was preventing them from learning and limiting their ability to experience life, grow, learn, and be happy.
Being mums ourselves, and drawing on our skills and personal experience, we got together and created Happy Confident Kids. The positive results we’ve seen so far have been amazing. The children who took part in a recent course all said they felt calmer and more confident, and nearly all said they felt better able to resolve their anxieties. We’re teaching children the life skills they need to be confident, resilient and self-reliant, and to be able to manage their own emotional state, all while making friends and having fun.” 
Recent NHS figures have shown a record 42% increase in cases of anxiety among school-age children in the last five years, prompting the government to address the way in which emotional self-care is taught in schools. 
Ofsted incorporated the impact that school life and the curriculum have on pupils’ mental health when it developed its new framework last year, and proposals are already in place to make mental health a compulsory part of the curriculum by September 2020. 
***The workshops taught the children a variety of easy to use skills that enabled them to be more confident in their own abilities by learning strategies to manage anxieties and worries and feel more capable. This helped build their self-esteem with strategies to implement in any situation. The feedback we have had from the parents of these children has been very positive, and some of the techniques taught have been used in real life situations. Chafyn Grove School*** 
Nikki said: “Our aim is to help schools meet the new government directives and free up valuable time and money. Children who are able to manage their own emotional state are more open to learning, which in turn allows teaching staff to allocate their time more effectively. 
Our vision is to buck the current trend of anxiety and poor mental health in young people by intervening before these issues become a problem. We’d like to see a world where all children are able to fulfil their full potential.”
Happy Confident Kids co-founders Nikki Emerton and Laura Dumbleton-Jones are experienced Master Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) practitioners, clinical hypnotherapists, Life Coaches and Lightning Process® practitioners. 
Happy Confident Kids currently has practitioners based in Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, North Dorset, Bath, South Gloucester, Co. Durham, London and Switzerland with plans to extend the programme both in the UK and abroad. 
To find out more, 0333 358 0390, email happyconfidentkids@gmail.com or see www.happyconfidentkids.org.uk for bookings and more information.