Team Lead School Wellbeing Service

A permanent part-time Team Lead and Supervisor post (0.6 WTE) is available in Islington's School Wellbeing Service (MHST).

This is an exciting opportunity to jointly lead one of the teams within Islington’s School Wellbeing Service (SWS). The SWS is part of the national Mental Health Support Teams (MHST) initiative, aiming to improve access to help, and the general culture of emotional support within primary and secondary schools. The service is delivered as a partnership between Whittington Health and LB Islington.

We are recruiting a proactive, creative and skilled colleague to join our thriving team. The successful applicant will be passionate about mental health in schools, widening access to services and enjoy inter-agency working.

The successful applicant will join one of our two locality teams in the School Wellbeing Service. The teams deliver preventative and early intervention mental health work to all the borough's mainstream schools. This work includes workshops, groups and individual interventions with CYP and school staff, as well as whole-school approaches to mental health. Each team is led by joint team leads from CAMHS and Educational Psychology, with four School Wellbeing Practitioners in each team and one or more senior clinicians. The SWPs and senior clinicians are supervised and managed by the team leads. We are in the process of bidding to expand the service with a third team so that we are able to offer more time to each of the borough’s schools.

The post holder will be the joint (with the educational psychologist in the team) lead clinician in the south locality team of the School Wellbeing Service - Islington’s MHSTs. They will line manage and supervise the School Wellbeing Practitioners (Islington’s Education Mental Health Practitioners) in the teams, having responsibility for their professional development and training, and establishing and maintaining team and individual caseloads. They will co-lead the team with the EP and work closely with the other team leads, team co-ordinators, Service Manager, Project Manager and education and local authority partners. They will contribute to the planning and establishment of a third Islington Team and the reconfiguration of the service to ensure that full and equitable coverage of all Islington Schools is maintained.

Whittington Health serves a richly diverse population and works hard to ensure that all our services are fair and equally accessible to everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we look after our staff. We aim to employ a workforce which is as representative as possible of this population, so we are open to the value of differences in age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, sexual orientation, and religion or belief. The Trust believes that as a public sector organisation we have an obligation to have recruitment, training, promotion and other formal employment policies and procedures that are sensitive to these differences. We think that by doing so, we are better able to treat our patients as well as being a better place to work.

Islington CAMHS is well integrated with partner agencies and is experienced in working together to deliver innovative, high quality mental health service jointly with our partners.

**Main responsibilities include**:
1. SWS Team lead role - the post holder will be the joint lead clinician in our south locality team working with the educational psychologist in the team. The role involves working closely with the EP/joint team lead, EMHP training course, the team manager, project manager, central CAMHS team managers and head of multi-agency CAMHS and with education and local authority partners.
2. Line management and supervision of School Wellbeing Practitioners (SWPs) - The post holder will provide weekly supervision to four SWPs on the delivery of evidence-based interventions for anxiety, low mood and behaviour difficulties, and education-specific interventions. In addition to supervision, they will assist with SWP assessments and support interventions where appropriate. Experience with CBT interventions is essential and knowledge of the guided self-help interventions that the SWPs will offer is important.
3. Responsibility for the programme of induction and local training of the SWPs.
4. Co-ordinating and managing the referral routes for SWP direct clinical work and for managing the SWP caseloads.
5. Supporting the co-ordination, development, delivery and evaluation of the indirect workload of the SWPs, including workshops and trainings.
6. Working with schools to set up and review input from the SWS to the school.

Please see job description for full details