Coventry SEND Support Services - Video and audio transcripts

The next slide which is over to James, thank you James.

Thanks very much Rich so um I'm James Gillam principal educational psychologist from the send service in Coventry and I spend a little bit of time today just talking through the mental health offer that we've got available next slide please.

So the service itself is split up into a number of different teams and probably when most people think of send and mental health they'll focus on the social emotional and mental health team that's a team of specialist teachers and who support children right across the city um but actually there are other teams as well who will support children with mental health and wellbeing needs so we've got our complex communication team and they focus on supporting children with autism and as the name suggests children with complex communication needs and one of the things that we found in our work is that often there's a coincidence of mental health and autism and when that occurs we try and support young people holistically I’ve got our early years team as well and I think it's worth noting that over time we have seen an increasing number of very young children presenting with poor well-being and emotional health um and we are putting together a strategy for how we can support children in earlier settings going into reception and with that and then of course we got the educational psychology team that's the team that that's I’m a part of um and we deliver a range of interventions around well-being um we'll come on to some of those in a little bit in terms of the reach of the team so we work with children right the way across the and the age range from birth up to 25 in practice it's usually the youngest kids for about two and three and we go up to sort of 16 or 17 years we work mostly in schools but we also work in earlier settings fe institutions and we do work in the home essentially we go where we need to be to do the work um usually the support we offer is commissioned by settings and through a service level agreement and the schools I think will be familiar with that and referrals into our service just for information we've got our online portal which again I think settings probably know about next slide please

in terms of the services we offer then I thought it might be helpful to split these up into services at the whole school level group and then individual so there's an awful lot that we provide um a whole school level those of you who came along to some of the sessions we did over the pandemic will know that we've got a lot of web resources on the well-being for education return or recovery curriculum website that's still up and running and there's still some really useful materials there and so you can access that by googling Coventry recovery curriculum we've provided a lot of um whole school claiming um examples of recent training that we've done around mental health um our emotion coaching and a lot of schools have taken that up and it's really something which is really quite straightforward to implement and make sense to young people and teachers and then again just picking up on something i mentioned earlier we've got that training around autism and mental health as well which we see is really important um in addition to training though we can offer more space and more than bespoke work so if there is something you want to do as a school organization to develop as a whole system how you support children's mental health needs we can help with that either through action research organizational development um or through putting together a bespoke um training program for you

move on to group support now there's quite a few um different options that we provide there as well just this did a couple of those up here for you um if i pick up on on just a couple of those perhaps and first one is circle solutions this is something which you might not have heard of before and it's a way of bringing together a group of people and to do some collaborative problem solving for a child or a young person and you might have seen something like this um on the tv on the internet because the um program is facilitated by somebody who creates a big drawing of what's going on um and you left with them with a really clear plan for how to move forwards um i think the other thing that I’ll pick up on here is whole class inclusion works so often um when we're supporting a young person who's experiencing a period of poor mental health we will focus on them but it's also really important to focus on their inclusion within their class because there can be a lot of resource in there that can help them too so we can we can kind of help with that okay next slide please.

so finally we come on to individual support again a really varied range here and I think probably that one of the key points I’d like to make is if you've identified a need within your setting and have a chat with your links and professionals if we've not got something that's um that we can offer off the peg we will go away we'll research we'll find something and come up with a solution that we can provide to you um yeah so real range we do offer and therapeutic support mostly delivered by our psychologists but specialist teachers provide this as well um so we're using cognitive behavioural approaches solution-focused approaches and recently invested a lot in act which is another therapeutic framework for use in schools and i know some schools have had a lot of success with that way of working um we can do consultations with families as well sometimes we know that that it's necessary to put in place support outside the home as well sorry outside the school um if we want to help a young person move forwards then we can assist with that um and then there's on the other side of the column there's a you know a couple of examples of the more creative type of work that we can provide so we even do sessions on yoga and breath work guided visualization um and then at the bottom there you've got things like emotion coaching and thrive so hopefully that's given you a bit of a whistle stop tour of what's on offer um but as i said the key thing and have a chat with your link send professional um if you'd like to know more so thanks very much rich I’ll and unless I said well I suppose yeah it might be might be some questions so wait a moment.