Precious Hands News!
What an exciting day for our owner Melanie. She travelled with Sarah Bentley (Chair of the Child Mental Health Charter) to Westminster to discuss the crisis in child mental health and the importance of the Play Therapy UK (PTUK) Child Mental Health Charter with Matt Bishop MP. It was a hugely successful meeting.
We discussed the challenges with funding, including Adoption & Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) and the impact this has had on our children and therapists. We also talked about the difficulties facing small schools with huge budget cuts to EHCP funding support. This has resulted in small schools needing to find tens of thousands of pounds to cover the cuts.
We then discussed the Child Mental Health Charter and the Charter's Six Principles. We focused on Principle 2- Protecting children- ensuring all therapists have a registered governing body. Principle 3- Investing in properly qualified workforce- we talked at length about the lack of regulation on the mental health workforce. We discussed that no qualifications are necessary to work in child mental health and this needs to be changed. We need to ensure all mental health workers are trained to at least Post-Graduate level. Principle 4- Ensure policy is informed and adequately funded. We explained that play & creative arts therapy is evidence based, PTUK have over 42,000 records on our confidential database Fortuna, following the completion of Strengths and Difficulties questionnaires. We discussed the statistics- 72% of children show a benefit in their mental health following play therapy and children with the highest difficulties with their mental health, showed an improvement in 82% of cases.
We finished by asking Matt Bishop MP to question why small schools are needing to find tens of thousands of pounds as their EHCP funding exemption has been cut.
We continued by asking him to support the Child Mental Health Charter and raise a question in Parliament ensuring our Country has a qualified, regulated mental health workforce and requested he supports this goal for our children.
It was a very positive meeting, we had a good discussion and we felt our thoughts were listened to.
Precious Hands owner Melanie was honoured to be invited to be the key speaker on Play Therapy and Parent-Child Attachment Play, at the University of Gloucestershire.
Speaking to a group of students studying for their Masters, Precious Hands was able to spread the word of the importance of Play Therapy and PCAP to a fantastic group of students.
Thank you University of Gloucestershire for being a great audience and asking important questions about therapeutic work inside and outside of schools in the Q&A session.
