Support for Emotional & Social Development

Strategies to support and promote Emotional Wellbeing and Mental Health  

We are a small, friendly and open school. We encourage parents and carers to speak to key members of staff whenever possible by telephone, letter, and email or in person.

• We provided specialist professional provision from a CAMHS key worker who is employed 2 days a week and works directly with pupils, staff and parent / carers.
• We have target interventions that help children to self-regulate their emotions and provides opportunity for relaxation and 1 to 1 counselling sessions.
• We encourage all parents, carers, children and professionals associated with the pupil to visit before they start school.
• We support the children fully when they move to comprehensive school by planned transition supported by our parent support advisor. We provide staff to accompany the children on their visits and members of the transition team spend time in our school.
• We hold regular progress open days for parents and carers.
• We have a varied and stimulating PSHE programme running through the school and internal and external active listeners who provide 1to 1 listening sessions e.g Listening matters “Chatty, chatty room” and named independent listeners.

In School Support – How can I identify emotional difficulties?

• Children can sometimes struggle to talk to the people who are closest to them, perhaps because they do not want to worry them or upset them or because they are trying to be ‘grown up’ and to cope on their own.
• Mental health professionals look for a range of ‘symptoms’ to try to understand when children have a difficulty of some kind. These can be symptoms that are more outward behaviour in, such as anger, aggression, loud disruptive behaviour, challenging behaviour etc. Research suggests that these kind of symptoms are over represented in boys and can include being overly quiet, withdrawn, uncommunicative, anxious, depressed, not mixing with friends, not eating, self-harming and so on.
• Generally girls tend to use these kinds of symptoms to express distress more, but all of these symptoms can be relevant to emotional functioning in both boys and girls.
• Any unusual behaviour that lasts more than a couple of days or very unusual behaviour should be taken seriously. Children have limited resources with which to communicate distress or confusion, and will often chose means that do not make sense to the adults around them. This is especially so for primary school children who often do not have the level of language or skills to communicate more complex experiences or feelings.

In School Support  – How do we help children with behaviour, social and emotional needs?

• In our school, we aim to help young people to develop into responsible adults who:
• are able to understand and talk about their feelings;
• control their behaviour so that it is constructive and not destructive;
• understand the perspectives of other people, and realise that their own feelings may be different from the feelings of others;
• are able to establish relationships with others and maintains an ongoing friendship with at least one other person;
• are able to understand that their actions have an impact on others;
• are able to deal with social situations such as meeting new people or behaving appropriately in formal interviews or meetings;
• are able to engage in and stay with an activity for a reasonable amount of time;
• are able to deal with mistakes and failure in a constructive way;
• know how and when to seek help for problems.

In School Support – Walworth Primary School – supporting families

Every parent / Carer wants to do the best that they can for their children and be confident managing family life. We recognise that any family may require extra support at times, particularly when children are very young.

We aim to provide support when families need it most. We will work with families and a wide range of professionals to build on strengths to meet their child’s needs.  We work with families to plan how we can help. This may mean a family choosing to work with a support or family worker. Some services, can offer support during evenings and weekends, as well as during the day.  We also look at other ways for families to feel more confident about parenting.  For example, there might be someone in the wider family who can provide help or a local service which could provide support but is hard to reach.