We know that for young people, having supportive relationships with the adults around them is crucial for improving their mental health. Whether it's parents, teachers, educational professionals, coaches or youth workers, these adults play a vital role in supporting young people to get the help they need.
That's why our programme offers information and training to parents and adults who support young people, helping them gain confidence in providing crucial mental health support. Through our Parents Helpline, community outreach, and training, we aim to ensure all young people have someone to turn to when they need support, and that the adults they turn to can really make a difference.
Every young person has adults in their life who they can turn to
Every young person has adults in their life who they can turn to for help with their mental health, whether that's at home, at school or in their community.
Every adult who wants to help a young person, can
Every adult who wants to help a young person with their mental health can come to us to gain the skills and confidence to do so.
Our Parents Helpline provides a lifeline for thousands of parents and carers. We quickly and easily connect parents with our trained advisors via phone and webchat. Our advisors offer support, information and practical advice, backed up by a dedicated email service and information and advice on our website.
Over the last year, we’ve transitioned to a new service model, which meant significant change for our parent and carer support systems. Although we narrowly missed our target of 15,000 parents and carers supported, we’re confident in the improvements it will bring – helping us deliver higher quality support on a larger scale.
All of this would not have been possible without the loyal support of our funders - Prudence Trust, Garfield Weston Foundation, Pears Foundation, and Westminster Foundation.
We’re taking our parent and carer engagement work even further this year by launching our new outreach programme. Through this, we will connect more widely with parents and carers, enabling us to gather more evidence and insights to shape and improve our services.
We’re continuing to reach out to trusted adults in the community and education. We've unlocked funding that allows us to offer support free at the point of delivery, work in partnership to reach more trusted adults where they are, and provide shorter training and skills sessions for those who have limited time.
In the last year, we reached and trained over 3,000 individuals, through free training sessions funded by Peter Harrison Foundation, as well as our In House and Open Access trainings. We also developed and delivered training to M&S staff on being a trusted adult, understanding mental health and supporting younger colleagues with their wellbeing. This was completed by hundreds of M&S colleagues.
Over the last year, we have worked with a number of health, education, and local services. This has included:
Working with participation champions in Northwest London, we also created a series of recommendations for improving the reach, accessibility and effectiveness of Mental Health Support Teams. Suggested by young people, these will be invaluable to future service and system design. As well as being implemented by Northwest London Integrated Care Board, they have now been shared with NHS England.
This year we completed a ‘discovery’ phase of our service design work, collaborating with Youth Advisors, youth workers and youth organisations leaders to better understand their experiences.
This connects with how we use our growing network of community organisations and partners to inform our service design, training, and information content development. We are making sure our work is led by the needs of young people, and the experiences of trusted adults supporting young people with their mental health.
We have continued to expand our resources, with new videos on self-harm, trauma and anger, new spotlight stories, and new web guides. These cover how to be a good listener, supporting a young person to get help, a quick guide to OCD in young people and a quick guide to ADHD in young people.
This year we've:
This year, we’ve learnt and evolved in our work through our connections with other grassroots organisations. We've:
To support more educators, we completed our pilot schools project in 15 schools across England and Wales. The pilot has provided a successful proof of concept, leading to further funding from the Hodge
Foundation to enable us to work with 16 more schools in South Wales across 2024/25.
As well as gaining a very positive final evaluation report from QA Research for our work, we’ve had very positive feedback from participants.