Who we are
Our Mental Health Support Team service will provide direct mental health support to 18 primary and secondary schools in St Helens.
The service aims to promote the early detection and prevention of mental health problems across the whole school, and strengthen links between schools and mental health services.
The team will provide direct, ongoing support to schools around mental health and wellbeing. This will include:
- Providing direct interventions to pupils with mild to moderate mental health conditions, such as anxiety, low mood or behavioural difficulties.
- Where young people require specialist support, making onward referrals for pupils to local services, such as child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS).
- Providing training, education and advice to school staff to help them better support their pupils around mental and emotional wellbeing.
- Championing mental wellbeing and resilience across the whole school community, providing guidance around issues such as bullying and coping with exam stress.
The service will sit alongside and complement any existing mental health support that schools have access to.
Who is our service for?
The service will eventually provide mental health support to 18 schools in St Helens. We are currently only accepting referrals from three identified placement schools but will be rolling the service out to all 18 schools later in the year. The placement schools are:
- Cowley International College
- St Augustine of Canterbury Catholic High School
- St Cuthbert's Catholic High School
How to access our service
We are now accepting referrals from placement schools. If you work within one of the three placement schools listed above, you can make a referral for one of your pupils on our website by completing our referral form.
Please bear in mind that the full service won’t be operational until the end of 2021. Any referrals you submit for your pupils between now and the end of the year will be for supervised practice with our trainee MHST practitioners.
This supervised practice will allow our trainee MHST practitioners to spend time getting to know your school and pupils while they complete their training course. The full offer of support will available once they have finished their training at the end of 2021.