The School & Family Works is an innovative company formed to break cycles of deprivation and inequality by ensuring children succeed in school. We work in schools and childcare settings with families who are having difficulty accessing the opportunities education offers. Drawing on psychodynamic and systemic thinking we build relationships, enable choice and facilitate emotional growth and learning.

At The School and Family Works we know the problems faced by ‘families at risk’ are no different in nature from the problems anyone else faces. We use a vocabulary that recognises how grief and emotional pain is common to all of us. It is in degree that differences can be recognised: degrees of intensity, complexity, and frequency. The reflective space required to process complex emotional difficulties is rarely available locally to families living in areas of high deprivation.

The therapeutic work we seek to do in schools offers opportunities to reflect, to sort out, to reduce reactivity and to clear space for rational choice. A by-product is that children find space to learn, behaviour improves, school attendance rises and children are happier. In enabling communities to develop among families who are often isolated this work opens parents as a resource to each other. Everyone benefits.

• Qualified, experienced therapists registered with
  relevant professional bodies
• Community-based interventions
• Evidence-based interventions
• Supporting the most challenged families in school
• Multi-agency thinking
• Enhanced CRB checked staff, familiar with school
  based work
• Experienced at the tier 2 / tier 3 interface
• Championed by families
• Credibility with Heads and teachers
• Experienced in bridging the boundary between
  mental health and education