I am a fully qualified and BACP registered school counsellor, with over eight years’ experience of working in schools. I offer school and college based counselling to young people. I work outside as well as inside, where the school grounds allow. Whether I’m outside or in with young people in schools, my main focus is on supporting students to gain somatic awareness and ways to learn to self-regulate. This way of working follows modern up-to-date research that has established just how powerful embodied therapeutic interventions are, and fits well with the attachment-informed model I use.
This Programme is aimed at years 6, 7, and 8, and focuses on increasing young people’s social, emotional, and behavioural skills. It does this by engaging young people with fun activities and techniques that familiarise them with their nervous system, challenge the unhelpful stories we tell ourselves, and learn how to self-regulate. A core part of the programme centres on building sound emotional resilience, empowering young people to develop the tools to both understand and talk about how they’re feeling and the ability to recover and bounce back from the challenges life throws at them.
**Introducing a NEW 12 Week Therapeutic Groupwork Programme**
This is a truly unique programme that is based pre-dominantly outdoors, which brings a different kind of energy, permission to engage in the therapeutic process, using highly engaging activities and therapeutic interventions that make it an inclusive resource, that include young people that struggle to transition to secondary school; those that have low self-awareness of their issues; those that find it challenging to focus indoors; and neurodivergent students.
Current data is showing that nearly a quarter of students struggle to attend school regularly, and mental health is at an all time low. This programme aims to combat school avoidance by offering highly engaging therapeutic interventions that include movement, active mindfulness, powerful storytelling to name but a few, to bring about increased resilience. It particularly targets anxiety, loss, trauma, low self-esteem, and poor boundaries. This can significantly increase attendance as access to learning increases as they learn to cope with the challenges faced in an educational setting more easily, going on to increased educational attainment and better behaviour in schools.
Groupwork offers a powerfully dynamic alternative to working in a 1-2-1 way, that provides the crucial scaffolding that is needed for change to occur. Advantages include gaining insights from peers, a permission to leave your safety bubble, increased confidence, and feeling less lonely. The more we feel connected, the more we feel safer to explore our challenges, and bring about lasting change.
How Is This Programme Structured?
This is an ongoing 12 week programme for up to five students at a time. Sessions last for a choice of one hour, or 1.5 hours. Sessions are held mainly outdoors, though a room would need to be available in case of wet/inclement weather. Programmes run at the start of Summer term, Autumn term, and Winter term each year and are designed to work as a rolling programme throughout the year – accommodating up to 15 students per year.
This programme has been designed to be both time efficient and cost effective to schools. Please get in touch to learn more.
KJM Counselling 