Lancashire Emotional Health in School Services (LEHSS) Update

“The LEHSS provides free training and support to primary and secondary schools and colleges in Lancashire on a range of topics relating to children's mental health. LEHSS are a small team of clinical psychologists with experience of working in CAMHS and training adult learners. The training aims to school staff to help them improve their knowledge and skills around children's mental health, in order to help schools support children's emotional wellbeing more effectively. LEHSS are funded by Lancashire County Council and based at Lancaster University. Over the last year, they have worked with staff from over 250 Lancashire schools, with 1,450 attendees at the training sessions.”

The offer of free training is open to all staff employed by a primary/secondary school, college or academy within Lancashire County Council (Blackburn with Darwen and Blackpool are not eligible for free places). These sessions are aimed at primary and secondary school and college staff, especially SENCOs, pastoral leads, mentors or any other staff with specific responsibility for pupils’ emotional health.

Training is delivered in a number of ways: via full day sessions arranged at community venues around the county, to teams in schools, and to school cluster meetings. Over the last few months LEHSS have been working with school cluster groups throughout the county as a way of maximising engagement with primary schools.

One example of this work is with the Burnley Inclusion Steering Group where a series of sessions have been arranged over the course of the 2019/20 academic year. These sessions are being organised in partnership with Sarah Price, head teacher at St Johns The Baptist, and will take place at Burnley Football Club. The sessions will cover three topics:

1) Understanding mental health, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and resilience
2) Communicating with children who are distressed, angry, anxious or unhappy
3) Understanding and using Attachment theory to inform interventions
 
Each session consists of 2 hours of interactive training, with sessions repeated three times to ensure as many primary school staff as possible can take part. The first three sessions for topic one took place in September 2019 and saw 165 school staff signed up from 19 different Burnley schools. The two further topics are taking place in January and April 2020.

For information on training sessions and to request training for your school or cluster please contact lehss@lancaster.ac.uk