Whole School Approach – Trailblazer Update

June has been a busy time for the education mental health practitioners as they have been getting ready to see their first caseloads of children from across the city’s primary schools.

Each of the 24 schools will be referring up to four children to the service for the first round of sessions (96 in total). Staff from all these schools have attended a twilight training session to skill them up in recognising signs of early mental health problems. This has proved challenging as many children don’t show any obvious outward behaviour in school at this stage. We have been talking to schools about different ways that they can identify pupils who may otherwise be missed. Some of these strategies involved using screen questionnaires, looking at data that schools already collect and giving parents more opportunity to express their concerns.

We were fortunate to have Wendy Minhinnett from parent charity Rollercoaster over to run a workshop with representatives from various Liverpool parent forums recently. She was leading a discussion about engaging with parents from each of our schools around mental health, and the importance of parents having a supportive space in schools to talk about any issues they may be facing concerning their children and even personally.

Any parents interested in being involved in this going forward should contact Kath at the Liverpool Learning Partnership for more information (kath@liverpoollearningpartnership.com).