;

Improving support for LGBT+ young people in schools and colleges

Dr Charlotte Woodhead, STEP Study Lead and Juliet Dyrud, Co-Production Team Member

22 February 2021

February is LGBT+ History Month – an annual celebration to educate and raise awareness about LGBT+ communities. It aims to teach young people about the history of the LGBT+ and related civil rights movements, and to promote inclusivity in today’s society. It was founded by Schools Out, who have a long history of campaigning for inclusive education. But why focus on young people and education, aren’t they aware enough already?

In order to thrive, LGBT+ young people need support, not just awareness. Although school can be a supportive environment and a place of growth—a “home away from home”—it can also be an unsupportive environment that adversely affects the mental health of young LGBT+ persons.

Bullying and peer victimisation experiences such as violence, anti-LGBT+ language, exclusion, and pressures to conform are all more common for LGBT+ students. These experiences adversely affect mental health and well-being, such as a sense of belonging, feelings of physical and psychological safety, and access to support. These things contribute to higher levels of problems such as depression, poor body image, self-harm, substance misuse as well as suicidal thoughts and behaviours among young people who identify as LGBT+.

Teachers and other staff who create more accepting environments can break this cycle. To support LGBT+ students, it is important that they understand LGBT+ issues and how being LGBT+ might affect students; and stand up for them and actively challenge bullying and discrimination, to create more accepting environments and help prevent mental health issues.

The Schools Training to Enhance support for LGBT+ young People (STEP) study, funded by the TRIUMPH network, is being co-led by a research team at the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, young people, and the Mosaic LGBT+ Young Persons Trust. We are working together to:

Identify what training is already available to school/college staff
Understand what makes it easier or more difficult for schools to access training, and to find ways to support uptake for different schools/colleges.
Improve training for secondary schools/colleges to better support LGBT+ pupils, focusing on what young people and staff think is important for school/college staff to know.

We also want to ensure that our work is intersectional. It is important that training is able to support all young LGBT+ people. This includes racial and ethnic minority and faith groups, young people from low-income families, as well as young people living in rural and coastal areas.

To do this, we will map out existing training providers in the UK. We’ll then select providers to interview to learn more about what training covers, how it’s developed and links to student mental health. We’ll also ask them to identify barriers they believe that schools face in training uptake and implementation.

Next, young researchers will lead group discussions with pupils (aged 13-19 years) and school staff to identify what they think is important for school staff to know.

We will then hold two creative workshops, both co-led by young researchers and including:

Students aged 13-19 years: to identify and design potential improvements to existing training.
School/college staff and people who run teacher training courses: to design ways to increase training uptake by schools.

We will use our findings to recommend changes to schools training, and to plan a larger research project to test out these improvements in terms of their impact on young people’s mental health.