Our School Family Worker service is part of Hertfordshire's Families First Early Intervention strategy.  We work with parents and carers in the home and school to deliver a targeted programme of support to families.  Our focus is to work with the whole family holistically to deliver positive outcomes. The targeted programme is varied and offers information and advice in many areas such as school attendance boundary setting and routines, bullying, family breakdown, financial and housing concerns, benefits advice, emotional wellbeing, SEND and school transition.  We can also signpost families to relevant services.

In addition to our School Family Worker service, we offer a number of other services which include mentoring, counselling, behaviour support, parenting courses and workshops. Further information on these services is set out below.  These services are delivered in schools to pupils and are either funded by the school through our partnership service, or families can be referred to us directly and pay for these services privately.

Should you wish to access any of our services, the first point of contact should be through your child’s school to see if they are able to support your family through our school partnership service.  If the school are unable to support your family through this service, parents/carers can request a private referral and pay for this service privately.  Prices for this service and our additional services are available on request.

Our additional services:

Counselling

Vista’s Counselling service is particularly beneficial for children and young people experiencing bereavement or separation, bullying, self-harm or relationship difficulties and problems at home.

St Albans Plus and Vista can provide a qualified Counsellor to support a child or young person aged between 5 and 19 years regardless of their gender, ethnicity, disability or sexual orientation. All Counsellors are quality assured by Vista and hold relevant qualifications. They are trained in Safeguarding and hold enhanced DBSs. Counsellors are members of BACP (their professional body), are BACP accredited and are experienced practitioners who follow the BACP ethical codes of practice and receive regular supervision.

The counselling sessions enable them to explore their feelings in a secure environment and enable them to move past their problems and build firm foundations for a secure future.

Each session lasts approximately 45 minutes, depending on the age of the child. The Counsellor regularly reviews the sessions to make sure that they are meeting the needs of the child or young person.

Mentoring and Emotional Support

Mentoring offers an experienced person for the child/young person to talk to where they can air their worries or concerns. Our Mentors are experienced in working with a variety of issues such as low self-esteem, eating disorders, family breakdown, friendships, bullying, anxiety, exam stress and issues around moving on to secondary school.

Each child or young person will receive a minimum of 6 sessions each lasting approximately 30-45 minutes. If further support is needed, Vista will signpost you and your child or young person to the right agency or service.

Behaviour Support

Vista’s Behaviour Support service offers interventions with individual students and small groups. These interventions support mental health such as anxiety issues, self-harm, self-esteem, building resilience, promoting emotional literacy, mindfulness. We address social skills and behavioural difficulties, anger management, transition, drug and alcohol issues.

We can carry out classroom observation, provide a full report including recommendations as well as attend meetings with the school and parents.

Support Programmes

Vista and St Albans Plus have a number of support programmes that are available for small groups or individual students. A sample of these are:

• Drawing and Talking
• Protective Behaviours
• Penn Resilience