PROJECT
Place2Be
PURPOSE
To support children with their mentalhealth in primary and secondary schools
FUNDING
The project costs around £34,000 for two-and-a-half days a week. Additional funding from grants, corporate donations and fundraising is used forinnovation, development and wider work
BACKGROUND
The charity Place2Be, which provides mental health support in schools, was founded in 1994 by qualified counsellor Dame Benita Refson. She was inspired by a project in Southwark, south London, which had placed a counsellor in a primary school. Her aim in setting up Place2Be was to support children as early as possible so their problems did not grow with them.
ACTION
Commissioned by schools and clinical commissioning groups, Place2Be provides each school with a qualified clinician who acts as project manager and is embedded in the school community. Project managers are based within the school during the hours the project runs, which can be between two to five days a week.
Place2Be oversees the initial selection and screening of candidates for the role but the school is involved in choosing the right person. “The type of clinician who will work effectively with young people in that environment is probably slightly different to the clinician that works well with younger children in a primary school,” says Place2Be chief executive Catherine Roche. “It is important for the school to be involved in the selection process because you want that really great working partnership.” Clusters of schools are overseen by a regional clinical lead and work together, sharing resources and contacts.
Place2Be takes a “whole school” approach, promoting positive mental health and wellbeing across the school and identifying mental health problems and challenges for specific children who might need additional support. “Increasingly, and especially over the last year, we have also focused on the role of school staff – both the role they play in supporting a child’s mental health and their own wellbeing – and also on parents,” says Roche.
Packages are tailored to the needs of the school and its pupils but can include one-to-one work with children who have specific support needs, drop-in services, short appointments to talk about worries and group work around friendship, self-esteem and other issues. Support may also include training for school leaders and staff, consultations with school staff on dealing with specific or more general behaviour and wellbeing issues, and advice and support for parents.
“The role of the project lead is a combination of delivering therapeutic services and managing many relationships with key stakeholders,” says area manager Angelica McMillan. “On a typical day they will start at the school gates, being very visible and approachable so parents that may need some support can talk directly with them.”
A drop-in service, Place2Talk, aims to help children understand and identify their feelings and ask for support at an early stage. “They can then be referred to the one-to-one service if we pick up that more support is needed, or it gives us an opportunity to get in touch with parents and teachers to support them to try and understand a little bit more about what may be going on,” says McMillan. “We also work with parents, supporting them in understanding their children’s emotional behaviours and conduct issues, maybe signposting to other services.” School staff are encouraged to approach the clinician and talk about what might be going on in their classroom. “That gives us information to provide support with circle times or assemblies to address specific themes,” says McMillan.
Assessments are carried out by the project manager but the one-to-one sessions are delivered by counsellors undertaking placements as part of their training and development. “We recruit and train them, they build up their skills and their practice hours with us, and we provide clinical supervision,” says Roche.
All support is informed by attachment theory and guided by three principles: building relationships, developing self-awareness and encouraging play as a way to explore feelings and learn new things. Place2Be counsellors come from a range of backgrounds and draw on different therapeutic approaches. In each school the project operates out of a specific space, the Place2Be Room. “Having a dedicated space where counsellors can carry out that one-to-one work in the school is incredibly valuable because it means mum and dad don’t have to take them to a specialist place – it’s just part of what is accessible in the school,” says Roche. The rooms are stocked with resources including paint, play-dough and sand trays as children often communicate through play – in secondary schools as well as primary.
A research and evaluation team gathers data which helps provide a tailored service to each school. “We pick up on trends and needs, and we make recommendations based on that,” says McMillan. Recently the organisation has seen an increase in issues around suicidal thoughts, self-harm, eating disorders and anxiety, she says. “It’s not just in our secondary school work, we’ve seen some of that come earlier at the top end of primary school,” says Roche. “That is why it is so important to get in earlier so we can address these issues before we get to that point in later years.”
OUTCOME
A team from the University of Exeter and the University of Cambridge worked with Place2Be to assess the longer-term impact of its service. Researchers analysed data on 740 primary school children who took up one-to-one counselling. Data was collected before the counselling started, around nine months after the sessions finished, and approximately one year after that.
The analysis found the children’s average “total difficulties” score, as measured by a questionnaire filled in by teachers, reduced from 14.42 to 11.09 around nine months after the intervention, and was 11.27 when measured around 12 months later. Questionnaires filled in by parents found average difficulties scores reduced from 15.64 to 11.29 and were at 11.32 a year later.
Place2Be’s own data reveals that of 1,023 primary and secondary aged children, 80 per cent with the highest levels of need showed an improvement in wellbeing following the Place2Be intervention while five per cent stayed the same and 15 per cent saw a reduction in wellbeing. Three quarters of 795 primary and secondary pupils saw an improvement in friendships while 19 per cent stayed the same and five per cent reported that friendships had got worse. Figures are rounded to the nearest percentage point. Around three quarters – 74 per cent – of 1,063 children and young people saw an improvement in their home life while 23 per cent stayed the same and three per cent saw home life decline. Meanwhile, 68 per cent of 1,047 caused fewer problems in class, 25 per cent stayed the same and seven per cent did not cause fewer problems.
A report by Pro Bono Economics found that for every £1 invested, Place2Be’s counselling service in primary schools has the potential to return £6.20 to society, in the form of higher earnings for the individual and a lower cost to the taxpayer.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Place2Be aims to extend the number of partner schools from 400 to more than 700 by 2025. It will continue to provide mental health lead training and is involved in embedding understanding around mental health into initial teacher training. It is also developing a parenting skills programme and exploring ways to increase the diversity of the mental health workforce. “I think finances are a real barrier so there might be work to be done around developing an apprenticeship for child counselling or school counsellors,” says Roche.
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