If you are completely clear about your school’s responsibilities for your pupils’ emotional well-being and mental health and the best ways of meeting them regarding:

• Therapeutic as compared to educational support
• The need to use practice based evidence
• Ensuring that the therapeutic support of pupils is covered in your updated Data Protection policy

Congratulations – read no further!  If not:

Therapeutic as compared to educational support

There are the two different responsibilities for primary schools each requiring rather different sets of skills:

1. Pupils with social, emotional, behaviour or diagnosable mental health issues that are impairing their learning capabilities and their future life prospects.  These make up on average 20% of all pupils in the UK.  They require individual therapeutic help.
2. Teaching good mental health for all pupils as a part of the curriculum.

Unfortunately, some schools are using programmes that meet ii) to put a ‘tick in the box’ for i).  Even worse some others are using school staff with inadequate training by on-line or videos and with no clinical supervision to carry out therapeutic work on the basis that it’s a low cost option.  This can be dangerous for the children.  If there is a complaint against someone who is not on a register accredited by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) or registered with the HCPC for working with children the complaint will come directly to the school – with possible devastating consequence.  You wouldn’t send pupils to an unregistered doctor, dentist or nurse would you?

For more information about managing this risk contact Monika on: mokijep@majemail.com

The need to use practice based evidence

The Green Paper of Transforming Children’s Mental Health referred to the need for evidence based practice but didn’t specify what this should be.  The existing medical models of evidence bases are not suitable for psycho-social interventions.  There is a crisis of reproducibility.  However, the Integrated Holistic model, developed in the UK has an evidence base of over 59,000 measures collected over 12 years clearly showing the positive outcomes of between 74% and 84% that have been achieved year on year for a large variety of presenting conditions. As observed by teachers and parents.

For more information about practice based evidence or the Integrative Holistic model contact Jeff on: jefferyht@majemail.com

Ensuring that the therapeutic support of pupils is covered in your updated Data Protection policy

In updating your school’s Data Protection policy to meet the requirements of GDPR have you included therapeutic data, who processes it, how consent is managed and whom it can be shared with?  Do you have efficient systems in place to deal with requests from data subjects or their proxies and for notification of breaches of confidentiality or loss of data?

If not, we have a check list and model Data Protection policy available at no cost.  Contact Jeff: jefferyht@majemail.com

Hope that this has been helpful.

Kind regards

Monika Jephcott – Chief Executive Play Therapy UK
www.playtherapy.org.uk

Jeff Thomas – Registrar Play Therapy UK
www.playtherapyregister.org.uk