The Lancashire Emotional Health in Schools and Colleges team offers training and support to staff from all primary and secondary schools and colleges in Lancashire on a range of topics relating to children's mental health. The team is based at Lancaster University within the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology programme, and has been funded by Lancashire County Council since 2014. Staff are experienced NHS clinical psychologists and professional trainers.

We have recently been awarded a 16 month extension to our current contract worth £210,00 which secures our work until July 2022. We are also expecting an additional award of £100,000 from central government as part of the Wellbeing for Education Return initiative which aims to support children’s mental health in schools in light of the impact of Covid-19 and school closures.

The offer of training and advice is open to all mainstream and specialist primary and secondary schools and colleges, and is free of charge. Our work aims to help school staff improve their knowledge and skills around children's mental health, in order to help schools support children's emotional wellbeing more effectively.

To date we have worked with 90% of secondary schools, 70% of primary schools and 90% of colleges in the county.

Feedback from schools on the quality of our training, and the impact it has had on both staff and pupils has been consistently positive:

“We are now looking at children through a different lens and seeing their behaviour and emotions in a different light. We feel we can understand them better and figure out better why they are behaving in a certain way, which then lets us support them better.”

“Using ideas from your sessions, discussions with pupils have improved their own thinking and approach to difficulties in school, and that they can transfer this to their life going forward.”

“After working with you, we now see supporting children’s emotional health as a real strength of our school.”



For information on our work: lehss@lancaster.ac.uk