Emotional Wellbeing and Effective Learning (EWEL) Team

Our service can work with your school to help improve the wellbeing, achievement and resilience of children and young people; and to support you to develop your capacity to meet the needs of more vulnerable learners.

The following teams are all part of our service and the support we can give you will be from across all these service areas:

Behaviour Intervention
Crisis Response
School Counselling
Mental Health Advisory Teacher Team

In some instances, the support provided may be established as an embedded part of the school provision. This is often the case with counselling.

Support for schools

Our service consists of a multi-disciplinary group of teams which include Educational Psychologists (EPs), Advisory and Inclusion Teachers, Specialist Inclusion Support Workers and Counsellors.

The support offered will be tailored to the individual interests or concerns of your school, but will often fall within one or more of the following categories:

Assessment and consultation.
Individual, small group or whole class interventions (psycho-educative, skills focused or therapeutic).
Evidence based training programmes for school-based staff; and support for these initiatives through support networks, workshop days, and development visits. Examples of this include Listening Matters -Connecting with Children, Nurture Groups and Creative Writing for Wellbeing.
Development or project work relating to specific interests or needs, including transition, solution circles, developing whole school approaches to mental health and resilience, attachment and trauma, anxiety, and staff wellbeing.
Delivery of evidence-based and universal programmes such as Developing a whole school Restorative Approach, the Durham Resilience Programme (DRP), Schools and Education Settings: Health and Wellbeing Framework (HWF) and Mental Health Awareness Programmes including Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) and Nurturing our Wellbeing (NOW).

Access and funding arrangements

All support offered is funded through commissions (Clinical Commissioning, Public Health, Communities of Learning, and Behaviour Partnership) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This means that while some support options are free, most are either subsidised or fully costed to purchasing schools. Full costings where these apply are based on the time required to deliver the support and are calculated on an up to £390 per day equivalent.

All involvements are discussed and costed at the time of enquiry. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, every effort has been made to provide as wide a range of support options as possible. As practices have adapted to social restrictions new ways of working have opened up, some of which allow for more flexible and time efficient access to our teams. It is anticipated that a hybrid model of working will be adopted for 2021/22.

Request for involvement forms can be found on our Local Offer at Templates, referral forms and reports. If in doubt, please discuss any request with the Link EP or SEND Partners for your setting.