Research suggests that the engagement of parents has a bigger impact on a child or young person’s academic learning than any other factor, including the quality of the school. The Family in Schools approach brings parents, teachers, children and mental health professionals together with the aim of helping to change and improve the children’s emotional wellbeing and behaviour so that they can be more settled and better able to engage with the teaching and learning opportunities on offer. By focusing on school-related behaviours parents can engage and they meet other parents who are ‘in the same boat’. This allows them to share experiences and ideas with others who may have struggled with or suffered from similar difficulties to their own.

The Family in School is a multi-family approach in a full-time school setting. It is a further development of how to bring parents into schools and get them to be partners in the educational progress of their children. The approach builds on previous work carried out at the Marlborough Family Service in London and it targets the most disadvantaged and ‘hard to reach’ pupils: managing children who were at risk of being excluded, or had in fact been excluded, from mainstream schools and bringing their parents into the classroom. The intention was to start from a child presenting with significant difficulties at school and then to create a multi-family group of parents and children in an educational setting. This was thought to to avoid or overcome the stigma, shame or blame that is often experienced by parents being referred to mental health or psychological services for treatment. Offering the help in a school-based setting around school-focused issues seemed more accessible and tolerable for parents who would otherwise be unwilling to accept help in a clinical setting.

The Family School approach consists of a full-time ‘special’ school which delivers a comprehensive teaching and learning curriculum whilst incorporating mental healrth interventions for pupils and their families. The aim is to help very vulnerable and marginalized children and young people to make the required academic progress at the same pace as their peers who don’t have very problematic behaviours and / or significant mental health issues. This requires a setting in which both education and therapeutic interventions sit alongside.

Parental participation of a minimum of one day a week is mandatory. This day starts with the parents arriving at 9.30 am for a joint breakfast and discussion. At 10.00 the Parent Learning Programme (PLP) starts. This is a bespoke programme, with a curriculum specifically designed together with parents, to attend to issues that are important to them and their children. The PLP is run weekly, with a 12-week curriculum cycle, and it is intended to help parents gain greater understanding of their own and their children’s emotional worlds and mental health issues, as well as covering various other relevant topics for family life, such as internet and online security issues, substance misuse and child protection issues. A major aim is also to boost self-esteem of parents as they work through the material given that many of the parents have themselves not succeeded well at school and present with low self-confidence and absent beliefs in their ability to achieve in their own right.

The PLP is followed by a multi-family session when the parents transfer their learning to their children, via a whole range of exercises, activities and games.

AP is designed to be short -term - the Fmail Schgool approach is continuously monitoring if and when the child is readu re-enter mainstreat mschool