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Craig
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Pete has provided counselling services every Wednesday morning at (Bradford primary school) for the past two years. To support the success of this, I have shared pertinent information with him and, on occasion, he has met with parents, both prior to and during the counselling period. He provides feedback as to his perceptions of the benefit or otherwise of the sessions to the child.
 The children he has worked with have had many different issues, often linked to their lives outside school. These issues have required bespoke support, sometimes looking at strategies they could use or ways to deal with their feelings, beyond that possible in a class or school situation.


Pete works hard to develop trusting relationships with his clients: some of whom have become very proficient at playing the harmonica as this is one of his routes to building that trust. Some of his clients have ongoing, long term support whilst others have benefitted from a couple of terms and more spread ‘touching base’ meetings. Whatever the period of counselling, the children have mostly made good strides to being in better places to deal with the issues that were preventing them socialising or focusing on their learning, some of which could have led to exclusion or alternative provision.


It has been a benefit that Pete is not part of our staff; the children know they are not likely to ‘bump into’ him around and about in school at any point in the day as they would with any of our in-house support systems, which means they can talk to him freely. The children know what they say to Pete stays with Pete – unless it is a safeguarding issue in which case he informs us.
 I feel this service has been beneficial to our children.