Mental Health+: Establishing requirements for positive mental health provision in VET Erasmus Project

Project Title

Mental Health+: Establishing requirements for positive mental health provision in VET

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Health and wellbeing; Research and innovation

Project Summary

MH+ will develop governance and benchmarking tools for use by VET professionals in order to understand and improve their current approach to mental health issues. In recent years, there has been a growing acceptance of a range of mental health conditions across Europe. This is evident through greater awareness of different mental health issues, for example amongst younger generations. Yet, despite this growing visibility, inequality still exists. Today as many as one in four (132 million) Europeans are affected by mental health problems each year, which MHEEN have estimated to cost every European household more than €2,200 per annum. These costs fall on many different budgets, but by far the most important of these is lost productivity in the workplace. This typically far exceeds the direct health and social care costs of mental health problems. People with mental health issues remain overrepresented in low-paid jobs across Europe, whilst the unemployment rate is higher than the EU average. People with mental health problems who become unemployed are also at greater risk of long-term unemployment compared to the general population.
Issues around mental health provision create a unique set of challenges for VET institutions and existing mainstream facilities, approaches and services have not always been designed to meet the needs of differing mental health issues. Although VET organisations address these issues in various ways across Europe, this training normally takes a ‘rehabilitation’ approach carried out by specialist providers for adults with severe mental health issues, and so mainstream services remain patchy. It leaves mainstream VET professionals unsure as to how to develop services which are inclusive, preventative and promote well-being for the full range of different young people engaging with their provisions.
Consequently, MH+ aims to develop a complementary ‘top down’ approach which allows VET institutions to fully understand how mental health and well-being fits into their services, and so develop responses which are inclusive of a range of learners. This will be achieved by developing a series of governance and benchmarking resources which underpin a structured and supported approach to quality service design. Partners will first develop a MH+ Charter which will set out the minimum requirements an organisation needs to conform to in order to consider its provisions inclusive of learners with mental health issues. This will be achieved through desk and field research into current best practices and emergent trends across Europe. The Charter will then be used as the basis for an interactive digital benchmarking tool which VET practitioners will be able to use to assess their current services and then track their improvement. This will be achieved through incentivised guidance and support which will highlight how VET organisations can evidence and improve provisions to meet the Charter’s minimum requirements. Each organisation’s score against the Charter will form a ‘Mental Health Footprint’, with those organisations scoring highly awarded a MH+ quality mark. The final project output has been designed with sustainability and long-term impact in mind, as partners will produce a skills profile and resources for the development of a Mental Health Champion role. Through this the project will demonstrate the value for VET organisations in dedicating permanent time and resource to gender issues, something which will also help the project’s other tools continue to be used after MH+ itself comes to an end.

Throughout these activities the project will look to engage with VET leaders, HR managers, equality and diversity leads etc. from across Europe. This will be complemented by the involvement of gender advocacy groups and policy makers. At the very least 96 participants will be involved across the project’s research, 130 participants during piloting and a total of 150 attending the launch events at the end of the project. Therefore, the project will produce highly transferable resources which will be able to be used in a variety of contexts across the continent. This will help MH+ achieve a wide impact on the governance structures found across VET institutions, helping these organisations to become more welcoming and inclusive for a range of young people with mental health issues. This will see an improvement in the numbers of students from these groups engaging with VET services, helping to address the current retention and drop out rates in VET. As a result, more people from within these groups will develop key employability skills, meaning that they are able to further their careers and become valuable members of the labour market, something which will ultimately improve social inclusion long-term across the countries involved.

Project Website

http://www.mentalhealthplus.eu

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 229863 Eur

Project Coordinator

ASPIRE-IGEN GROUP LIMITED & Country: UK

Project Partners

• FUNDACION INTRAS
• FONDATSIYA NA BIZNESA ZA OBRAZOVANI
• Learnmera Oy
• Hugarafl
• CESIE