Personal perspectives across education and mental health in a therapeutic school

In this chapter, three senior staff at a specialist, therapeutic school—head teacher, lead nurse/clinical lead and child psychotherapist— talk about their experiences of working together to support children who have experienced severe deprivation and trauma. They discuss what child psychotherapy brings to the school and how it works alongside teaching and psychosocial nursing in a “therapeutic milieu”. They describe how, as well as providing individual and group therapy, the school’s child psychotherapists join together with other staff to think about what children are communicating through often challenging behaviour, how they try to make sense of difficult group dynamics that distressed children inevitably create and “get psychoanalytic thinking into the school in a very practical and accessible way”