Emotional Wellbeing and Effective Learning (EWEL) Team

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).

Our counselling service

Durham Schools Counselling Service is part of the EWEL team and provides counselling and therapeutic support to children and young people aged 3 to 18 in schools and education provisions across County Durham. 

The service is an organisational member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and follows its ethical framework. Our counsellors are trained to work in various ways with young people including through art and play. Our types of counselling include person-centred counselling, psychodynamic counselling and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. You can read more about these and other types of counselling on the BACP counselling pages. 

We offer counselling in schools during term-time, and our team can be contacted Monday to Friday 8.30am to 4.30pm. Please Contact Educational Psychology Service if you would like a copy of last year's summary report, or to see our diversity, equality and inclusion strategy.

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. 

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.

Course directory

See our SEND and Inclusion courses for information about the latest courses available.