We have one 0.6 FTE post available in Islington’s School Wellbeing Service.

Islington’s School Wellbeing Service is part of the national Mental Health Support Teams (MHST) initiative, aiming to improve access to help and the general culture of emotional support within primary and secondary schools. The service is delivered as a partnership between Whittington Health and LB Islington. The teams deliver preventative and early intervention mental health work to all the boroughs mainstream schools.

We are recruiting proactive, creative and skilled colleagues to join our thriving team. The successful applicants will be passionate about mental health in schools, widening access to services and enjoy inter-agency working.

The successful applicant will join one of our two locality teams in Islington’s School Wellbeing Service. The role will include helping to develop and deliver a wide range of interventions within schools including direct psychological interventions with children, young people and their carers as well as groups, workshops and staff training as part of a whole-school approach to mental health. Alongside the team leads they will contribute to service development and evaluation and support the development and embedding of the SWS within Islington’s schools.

Whittington Health serves a richly diverse population and works hard to ensure that all our services are fair and equally accessible to everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we look after our staff. We aim to employ a workforce which is as representative as possible of this population, so we are open to the value of differences in age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, sexual orientation, and religion or belief. The Trust believes that as a public sector organisation we have an obligation to have recruitment, training, promotion and other formal employment policies and procedures that are sensitive to these differences. We think that by doing so, we are better able to treat our patients as well as being a better place to work.

Please see the Job Description and the Person Specification attachments for full details of this role.

Main responsibilities:
To provide highly specialist mental health assessments of children of school age and their families, using individual, parent and family interviews, formal developmental, psychometric and other assessment methods as appropriate.

To provide specialist generic and discipline-specific preventative and treatment interventions for referred clients including school age children, adolescents and their families.

Working in partnership with schools, to support children, young people experiencing mild to moderate mental health difficulties and their families in the self-management of presenting difficulties.

Provide a range of information and support to schools for evidence based psychological interventions, including guided self-help and signposting to other services where appropriate.

To facilitate and co-facilitate a wide range of groups and workshops in schools.

Work alongside other team members to deliver training sessions, workshops, group and individual interventions in schools.

To liaise with other education, health, social care and voluntary sector staff from a range of agencies, in the care provided to clients.

To support the management and screening of referrals into the SWS

To help manage the day-to-day running of the SWS at an operational level.