This September marks 30 years of Place2Be supporting children's mental health! 

Since our founding in 1994, over 70% of schools have accessed Place2Be’s training, support or resources. Our mental health practitioners have helped over 400,000 children and young people build life-long coping skills and thrive.

Together we’re making a difference - by equipping people with the skills and knowledge they need to support pupils, we are transforming the lives of children and young people.

How have we achieved this?

We have developed the whole school approach to improve mental health and wellbeing of pupils and the whole school community. By training and supporting school staff, mental health professionals, parents and families, we're empowering them to best support children and young people. We understand the importance of building trust with the children and young people, their families and the schools we work with.

Having a trained mental health professional in our partner schools means children and young people get the vital support they need. Around 1,000 mental health professionals train with us each year. We have goals to continue building and expanding the mental health workforce, as well as making it a more accessible and inclusive career path.

In addition to training child counsellors, Place2Be helps develop school staff and teachers to give them the skills and knowledge they need to better understand behaviour. This understanding empowers school staff to have the confidence to help children and young people be the best version of themselves.

We know there's so much to do. Over 75% of children and young people need mental health services that they're not receiving. That's where Place2Be can help - by training more mental health professionals, we can reach more children and young people across the UK.

Place2Be started out in just one school in London and is now working with over 650 schools across England, Scotland and Wales.

We've done a lot in the last year! Just to give an idea, we:

• worked directly with a school population of over 350,000 pupils
• had over 45,000 children and young people speak with our mental health support services
• supported over 14,000 pupils through our targeted support
• celebrated the 10th Children's Mental Health Week, empowering children and young people to express themselves, and to know that their voice matters
• hosted a roundtable with partner organisations to find solutions to the rising challenge of school absences
• launched bursaries for our child counselling courses to improve the accessibility of the career.

30 years ago, Dame Benita Refson DBE, a qualified counsellor, had a vision to embed mental health support directly into schools. She wanted to enable children to access help when and where they needed it, and she wanted this help to be there from an early stage.

By 1996 the service was expanding, and Place2Talk was added as a key component. Place2Talk is a mental health service that allows pupils to spend 15–30 minutes with a trained counsellor. They can go alone or with a friend to talk about any issues they might have. At this point, children could recognise they needed help and they could access counselling on their own terms. This was a real turning point; children and young people were given the confidence and opportunity to take control of their own mental health.

As Place2Be began to grow, it became clear that supporting children needed to involve the whole community. In 1998, we launched our first counsellor training course, funded by the Department of Health. Training counsellors, teachers, and school staff, meant we built a network of professionals who understood the importance of early intervention.

A few years later, in 2003, we extended our reach to parents and carers by launching A Place for Parents and later on, Parenting Smart.

Over the next 20 years, Place2Be went from strength to strength and continued to take the lead in building understanding in the importance of getting mental health support early on. From launching Children's Mental Health Week in 2015, to introducing remote support during the COVID-19 pandemic, we've been equipping children and young people with the skills they need to cope and thrive.