At Golftyn, through conversations with parents, teacher updates and our own well-being surveys and monitoring, we are able to keep track of how our children are getting on and identify when additional support may be beneficial.
Though not exhaustive, below is an overview of some of the support available for our children struggling with emotional, social or mental health challenges, all delivered in house by our trained well-being team.
General well-being and Youth Mental health first aid.
It is important to detect problems in childhood mental health early to ensure the young person access the most appropriate support at the right time. Youth mental health first aid helps children who are struggling with their mental health in a safe environment and age appropriate way.
In addition to the more formal programmes and interventions detailed, there are other children being supported as and when required, this may be a single contact to help with a particular issue, or more regular check ins.
They are monitored, supported and ultimately may or may not move to a more formal programme if appropriate.
Emotional Literacy Support
ELSA is an initiative developed and supported by educational psychologists, who apply their professional knowledge of children’s social and emotional development to areas of need experienced by pupils. ELSA’s provide on-going professional supervision helping to ensure best practice.
ELSA focuses on emotional literacy and covers a range of individual issues like: anger, anxiousness, low self-esteem, independence, growth mindset and behaviour to learning, social skills. The sessions are tailored to the individual child and their emotional literacy needs.
Fun Friends and Friends Reliance
The Friends Resilience programmes help children and young people learn a range of skills to develop and enhance their skills in resilience, problem solving and coping.
Children and young people learn how to cope with everyday worries by building confidence and self-esteem. FRIENDS also teaches thinking and emotional problem-solving skills in a simple, structured format.
Feelings Detectives
This is a coping skills intervention programme specifically designed for children aged between 7 and 13 years who would benefit from a boost in confidence with a little help around social communication and interaction skills, including, but certainly not exclusive to those with autism.
Along the way they will learn a range of skills to enhance their resilience and problem-solving abilities. They will also be taught coping methods to help manage anxiety using cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) principles.
Emotion coaching
Emotion Coaching is based on the principle that nurturing and emotionally supportive relationships provide optimal contexts for the promotion of children’s outcomes and resilience.
Emotion Coaching uses moments of heightened emotion and resulting behaviour to guide and teach the child and young person about more effective responses. Through empathetic engagement, the child’s emotional state is verbally acknowledged and validated, promoting a sense of security and feeling ‘felt’. This activates changes in the child’s neurological system and allows the child to calm down, physiologically and psychologically, resulting in improved academic outcomes, fewer behavioural problems and becoming generally more emotionally stable and resilient.
Drawing and Talking
This is a gentle, non-intrusive method of working with children that can help to support their emotional and learning needs.
The intention is to support our young people to develop and explore new communication methods that build internal resilience and often helps to resolve emotional distress in a safer and more contained way.
Working with the child or young person’s inner world needs to be carried out safely and non-intrusively, with respect for the child or young person’s own pace and state of being.
The child or young person sets the pace and decides what to bring to the session.
The positive power of Play – Lego based therapy
Playing with LEGO in a therapy setting promotes social interaction, turn-taking skills, sharing, collaborative problem-solving and the learning of concepts. It can be used to target goals around social skills, language and motor skills. By using a commonly adored tool like LEGO it capitalises on its existing motivation and supports self-esteem by allowing the participants to demonstrate their skills in a social situation. It also sets up a positive opportunity for guided social problem-solving to help develop social skills that can then be used in other situations.
Unearthing
This is an art-based project, the unearthing box helps ‘unearth’ our positive qualities, understand ourselves and others better and work out positive solutions for life’s thorny problems.
Delivered on a 1:1 basis, the programme is approximately 6 hours in duration, split into weekly sessions.
Outcomes include, increased self-esteem & empathy, solve problems with positivity and compassion and to discover our wisdom and use it to progress.
Place2be Counselling Skills
Including the use of child counselling skills, including using play, creative work and narrative.
In training with Place2be you develop an understanding of counselling theory, with an emphasis on attachment theory and build self-awareness, identifying any barriers you might have in communicating and being emotionally available. Through such child centred sessions children may safely experience a therapeutic benefit.