About Potential
My mission to nurture and support our young people's future.
Potential is an educational coaching and consultancy ran by Matt Scarr; specialising in mental health psychoeducation and resilience training for young people. Our goal is to bridge the gap between mental health awareness and child referrals to clinical support by focussing on early intervention and preventative support. We seek to achieve this by implementing practical, research-backed solutions tailored for schools, educators, parents, and communities.
By delivering workshops, digital resources, and personalised guidance to young people and professionals working with them, we empower young individuals to recognise their innate resilience and confidence necessary to navigate life's inevitable challenges.
Our approach combines interactive learning, expert insights, and a focus on real-world applications to make mental health education accessible and impactful.
Why Coaching is Needed?
The prevalence of mental health issues among young people in the UK has risen significantly in recent years, with approximately one in five individuals aged 8 to 25 experiencing a probable mental disorder in 2023 (NHS England, 2023).
The threat to life for this demographic is particularly significant also; The UK charity, YoungMinds have that suicide rates for 15–19-year-olds are the highest they have been in 30 years (YoungMinds, 2022).
At Potential, I believe that early intervention and education are key to reversing these troubling trends. Many young people struggle to access adequate support, and educators often lack the resources to address mental health challenges effectively. By equipping students with an unlocked sense of curiosity they are better equipped to discover and nurture their resilience
Crucially we see the vital role of those individuls and teams whom students look up to. It's our secondary cause to provide educators and caregivers with the knowledge to foster emotionally supportive environments, we aim to bridge this gap.
"Bridging the Gap"
The current mental health provisions in the UK are struggling to manage under significant backlog of cases and schools are increasingly finding difficulty in supporting their students due to a spiralling effect that we are seeing over and over again in young people:
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Students who have been identified as requiring further support with their mental heath are experiencing prolonged delays before they are seen by a trained EMHP or counsellor.
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We are frequently seeing in that time a profound deterioration in their mental health and their associated symptoms.
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As these symptoms worsen over time, what once could have been resolved with mild-to-moderate support provided by EMHPs is developing into more chronic and complex psychological difficulties that may require referral to more severe support through CAMHS.
This service gap is unfortunately allowing too many young people to fall through the cracks and leading to many leaving school 'rudderless' with complex psychological needs with no obvious way to do anything about it.
Eight principles to promoting a whole school or college approach to mental health and wellbeing.
Promoting children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing A whole school or college approach, HM Government (2021)
What can be done?
In line with the UK government's recognition of the necessity to gear our educational providers towards a coordinated, whole-school approach, Potential believes in early intervention and prevention by adopting research-based whole-school approach to Preventing, identifying, giving early support and giving Access to Specialist Support
Potential's method recognises psychoeducation, resilience training, and a multi-modal approach to somatic interventions as a key tenets to providing this whole-school approach that aims to provide greater autonomy and agency in students to be empowered to grow as students.
“When people are in their element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose, and well-being.”
Sir Ken Robinson
My Story
It was whilst whilst working on my postgraduate degree that I saw a major disconnect between what I was studying and what advice I knew was being provided by the youth-centres that I was concurrently been volunteering for.
I was so evident that brilliant research was being published that was shining light on new and better approaches to assisting young people in supporting their learning and development but which was not getting the light of day by the wider social care and education sector.
In this moment of clarity I decided that an organisation needed to be formed that would help bridge this gap between the complex world of research and the equally complex needs of young people. Through witnessing struggling young people's services, schools and parents, it was clear that the message had to be
to one of empowering young people by providing them with the knowledge and tools to manage their mental health effectively.
Furthermore, through developing workshops, training, and resources, I could aim to bridge the gap in mental health education within schools, colleges, and communities. This in practice meant fostering a proactive approach to mental well-being, and using a consultancy we could will address the rising mental health challenges faced by the educators ad parents themselves for young people in the UK.
Crucially, many of the challenges young people face were not their fault, and Potential recognises the needs for reforms and better funding of the services that were once able to support them. However, we see the immense power that comes with assisting and enabling young people to recognise their own the innate resilience within themselves. This, in turn provides them with the best, equip with the skills and self-belief, to navigate and thrive the pressures and challenges of modern society.
How we deliver potential difference?
Our mission is to empower young minds with the tools to navigate life's challenges, ensuring that mental well-being is prioritised in schools, communities, and beyond.
We achieve this by taking a fully-zoomed out approach to assessing causation. This means not just placing a sticky-plaster over an emotional wound but assessing the specific challenges of an individual, a group, class or even school.
Meet Your Coach
Hi, I'm Matt!
It's a huge honour to work with education providers, teachers parents, students and young people from all walks of life.
I have an academic background in Psychology in Education and it was through my studies that I first came to realise that in the UK there continues to be a vast deficit in between the highly relevant, new research that was transforming how psychologists saw mental health in young people and the knowledge ad expertise that those working on the ground had to asssist their students and mentees.
It was critical to me that the wider pubic, especially those working intimately with young people were better equipped to understand the needs of young people in an empowering and non-prescriptive approach to seeing mental health difficulties in young people.
I later trained with iheart principles, an organisation driven to transform to perception of resilience and wellbeing as being innate within every single one of us.
I worked as a tutor to young children and teenagers and it was through this time that I recognised a crucial dissonance between the parents own view and the student I saw in front of me. Many parents who came to me looking for help for their child who was falling behind in English classes were not lazy or distracted.
When in the comfort of their own home I saw a curious, inquisitive, conscientious student who was excited to learn. I often couldn't believe how the student was described to me by their parent.
I too became curious. It led me to write my own thesis on the negative effects of internal self-talk on self-esteem and attention. What I learned is that many young people are ultimately pre-occupied by an inner turmoil that is hijacking their nervous system and leading to the shutting off of vital parts of their brain used for cognitive processing - i.e. absorbing the content of what they are leaning at school.
This led me to write a program that would lead to giving a sense of control back to their own internal systems. This was my unique course: Potential Capacitor.
For more information on the effect that an unsettled nervous system has on a young person's development please read my this article in our resources page.