When Faisal* walked through the doors of our school at the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital, we only knew his name. Like so many of our pupils, he had been admitted because of a mental health emergency and was too unwell to leave the ward. It took daily visits by our teachers to build trust and to work out what they could do to help.
They discovered that Faisal had been struggling to attend his own school for months, becoming a housebound recluse and living in self-imposed darkness, with the curtains drawn 24/7. Faisal had disengaged completely from learning and in many ways had disengaged from the world.
