AcSEED Mental Health Accreditation

The Fermain Academy are delighted to have been granted the AcSEED Award for our work involving young people’s mental health.

The AcSEED Initiative is a concept founded by young people with direct personal experience of mental illness at a young age. Their combined experiences have been used to identify and recommend a range of best practices that could have helped significantly in identifying and supporting their emerging emotional difficulties during school years. They were unanimous in viewing school as a pivotal environment that significantly influenced their emotional development, and in the belief that targeted intervention within this educational and social framework could have made a significant difference in helping to contain and manage their mental health vulnerabilities.

The AcSEED Award is a quality assurance mark presented to schools that have made a substantial effort to support the mental health of their students. It encourages and rewards the provision of high quality emotional wellbeing services, from the broad provision of information right through to appropriately targeted intervention. Based on best practices, the scheme defines a set of standard criteria that all schools must meet in order to receive the award.

The AcSEED review team were particularly impressed with The Fermain’s emotional health policy, training of all staff in mental health awareness, strong links with external agencies and our wellbeing support.

To read more about the AcSEED Initiative, visit http://www.acseed.org