A Resilient Year!

Written by Kessa Amoo, Project Manager, Education Works

In light of Mental Health Awareness Week, the Education Team has been looking at how we can support the mental health and wellbeing of students through our workshops. After a great response, we are very lucky to have launched our third spotlight session with the focus this month being on Resilience. Our spotlight sessions are a cross-institutional opportunity, focusing on tip sharing on a range of employability skills and wellbeing tips, hoping to support students outside of curriculum learning to build on necessary skills such as resilience and presentation skills, where our schools cannot currently support the same levels of corporate engagement as they would in ‘usual years’. We know that the mental wellbeing of students currently studying in all phases of education need to be supported, and students have had an incredibly unsteady year. Amongst the many valuable tips that were shared throughout the session, one of the most important that was echoed was:

Our volunteers did a fantastic job at ensuring that students were given an amalgamation of tips to put in their back pockets and, with lots of positive feedback received, we are delighted that this kind of support is incredibly useful and gives impactful, engaging and useful support to students during this challenging time.

During Mental Health Awareness week, we also ran a ‘Resilience and Staying Positive’ workshop with Newham College. After a tumultuous year, we all know what it means to be resilient and though resilience is an important skill to develop, it is not necessarily one that is cultivated in the classroom. This session focused on how to build resilience, and had inspirational speakers from two companies to share their life experiences with the students. During the session, we identified that students did not know how incredibly resilient they had already been throughout this year. The session concluded with building the students’ understanding of positive affirmations and how to use them, which consisted of a mood-board type exercise where students could write positive things to themselves. Students wrote positive and motivational comments to themselves such as ‘I love me’ and ‘never give up and keep pushing through’ which takes a lot of courage to share. One comment from a student that particularly echoed their take away from the session was ‘life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient’.

Identifying students’ resilience is incredibly important in helping them to understand the skills they possess, as well as being able to recognise and develop this essential life skill for overcoming challenges and setbacks in the future. The conversation of supporting students’ wellbeing does not stop here, and we aim to continue to run workshops like these in order to develop not only employability skills, but improve wellbeing and strengthen life skills for the future. This was an incredibly positive experience, and it was fabulous to know that we had impacted the students in such a positive way.

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