Learn more about our study looking at the impact of primary school counselling on mental health service referral rates.

This research paper, "Impact of counselling provision in primary schools on child and adolescent mental health service referral rates", was originally published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) in 2021.

If you have any questions about this research or any of our other research projects, don't hesitate to contact our Research and Evaluation team at researchteam@place2be.org.uk.

Summary

Purpose

The purpose of this research project was to see if Place2Be's primary school counselling service had an effect on Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) referral rates in South London.

What is CAMHS?

CAMHS, short for Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services, is an NHS service that supports children and young people who are experiencing poor mental health.

What we did

In this study, we looked at data from the National Pupil Database (NPD) and CAMHS referrals to the South London and Maudsley’s NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM). The data included 285 state primary schools in four London boroughs for the academic years 2007–2012.

What is the National Pupil Database (NPD)?

The NPD is a government database of all pupils in state schools in England. It contains information on attainment, exclusions, absences and pupil backgrounds.

During the study period, 23 of these schools had Place2Be in-school mental health services. We looked at the amount of school-level accepted CAMHS referrals for the academic year 2012/13 in schools with and without Place2Be's in-school services.

Findings

We found that some school characteristics, including poor Ofsted results and having a greater proportion of white-British pupils were related to higher CAMHS referrals. However, having Place2Be mental health services in school was not related to the number of CAMHS referrals made.

In combination with the known effectiveness of school-based counselling, this suggests that having a school-based counselling service does not lead to a flood of referrals to CAMHS but is likely to be doing well at treating mental health challenges within schools.

Read the full research paper

You can read, download and share the full research paper, "Impact of counselling provision in primary schools on child and adolescent mental health service referral rates: a longitudinal observational cohort study", below.