Case study of mental health services - Place2Be

https://www.place2be.org.uk/about-us/our-work/

Place2Be is a charity that focus on provide mental health services to young children that aged eight to twenty five years old. The charity worked with around five hundred schools across the UK and provide support to young children, parents and school staff. Apart from providing counselling services, Place2Be also organise talk service and art and music activities to children, helping them to deal with mental health issue before it’s too late. Since children are vulnerable, the charity established their safeguarding and child protection procedures to illustrate how they work with the schools when they’re aware of any low or high threshold safeguarding concern of any children. Place2Be will share the concerns with school staff and discuss what further actions is needed based on the findings of risk assessment. Parent or carer will also be informed, so that all parties can work together to deal with the issue. The area manager of the charity will also keep monitoring these incidents across the area and make sure the actions of the frontline meet the charity objective and protocol. 

I’d like to discuss how Place2Be assess the needs of the children and how it help the counsellors to do the work. Place2Be work with the schools closely and the school staff are trained to keep awareness of the children and they’re the first line to identify children that need help and Place2be will then interfere. If the issue is not crucial, then Place2Be will help them via the whole class activities and lite counselling service at recess time. If it’s recognised that extra support is needed, then the charity staff will hold a mental health assessment that called 'Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire' to measure the mental being and determine what’s the best options to offer to the children. Depending on each children’s unique situation, cognitive behavioral therapy, individual or training that involve parent and children will be provided. The referral process is important to the charity, so that they can refer to appropriate parties in order to support the children. If Place2Be found that the children need additional support, they will then further refer to family practitioners or educational psychologists that work for Place2Be. The charity will also refer children to Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services, which is the NHS service that supports children who are experiencing poor mental health if needed. Moreover, Place2Be also works with various mental health associations and creative arts organization to provide creative expression sessions if those young people wish to explore their feelings and thought via drawings or music. 

I’d like to discuss the limitations of counselling, considering how Place2be work at a school setting. First of all, I think the effectiveness of the charity highly rely on the cooperation between school staff and their staff member. According to my understanding, they partner with school to prioritise mental health and wellbeing of the entire school community, so that children will be benefit from it. However, there maybe some tension between the two parties view of how to manage school daily operation. This may become very complicated if the school senior leadership team wish to have their own plan. On the other hand, I think the success of Place2Be heavily rely on the parents’ contribution. It’s unknown whether parents are aware of the importance of children mental health and they may have negative attitude towards the comment and suggestion from Place2Be. If the parent disagree with the assessment and refuse their children to attend counselling, then it’s hard for Place2Be to take further action.

To conclude, the above journal discussed how Place2Be work with the young children, what’s their referral way and what I think might be their limitation to work at school setting.