Group Therapy

JSA have had great success in working with schools and education providers to devise bespoke programmes to assist children and young people in the mainstream education system with challenging behaviours.

Typically, we offer a six-week programme, whereby we work with groups of students together. This makes the programmes in question a more economically viable choice for our schools to invest their funds than individual sessions.

The issues that these sessions provide support for may include specific or moderate learning difficulties (SLD/MLD), emotional, social or behavioural difficulties (ESBD), or any other educational problems that cause frustration for the children, or disruption in the classroom.

The purpose of this programme is not to provide clinical diagnoses for the attending children, nor should it be considered an interchangeable alternative to a comprehensive, individual course of therapy. Instead, a bespoke programme of therapy is prepared in consideration of the needs of the educational group as a whole, based on the information provided by the school.

Our work with both primary and secondary school groups utilises clinical techniques that will enable the children and young people to function more effectively and form a healthier, more positive relationship with their peers and teachers whilst in the school environment.

Whilst it can be beneficial to group the students by age or by the particular challenges they face or present, we recognise that schools are limited on time and funds, and so therefore we are happy to work with a range within a group. For primary schools, a lot of our work takes the form of play therapy, but in secondary schools, we can often incorporate more age appropriate therapeutic models.

We encourage teaching assistants and support staff to be in attendance at these sessions, especially if they would usually spend a particular amount of time with one or more of the children selected to participate. The aim of our programmes is not just to provide therapeutic intervention for the duration of the course we are working within, but to allow the schools to adopt the tools and techniques that we offer at JSA in order to better support their pupils in the long term.