Counselling

Counselling

The JESS Counselling Team seeks to understand student mental health needs and offer short-term therapeutic support and throughcare to enhance personal growth and resilience. 

We offer a confidential service to meet the needs of JESS students using developmentally appropriate therapeutic methods.  Support can be responsive or preventative and includes individual sessions, group work, parent information and teacher support. 

Each counsellor is registered with a professional body such as the British Psychological Society, having met their stringent eligibility criteria. There are three counsellors within the Primary Schools and a further two counsellors at Secondary.  Each counsellor has knowledge of psychological development in childhood, mental health presentations and experience of different therapeutic frameworks (such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Play Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy etc.).  This enables our counsellors to use the most appropriate evidence-based method to support individual mental health needs. No issue is too big or too small,  some examples of the topics students discuss include feeling stressed or anxious, grief or family transitions, changes in mood, struggles with body image/self-esteem, and friendship issues. 

All therapeutic methods used incorporate the fundamentals of client centred therapy which is embedded in our JESS Counselling Model. 

The JESS Counselling Model

• Enables students to explore their feelings, thoughts and actions whilst feeling safe and emotionally contained.  
• We listen without judgment, use Socratic questioning to explore, and reflection to check understanding, drawing a shared meaning of the experience. 
• We hold difficult conversations and work through painful emotions to support self-reflection and awareness, the key to personal growth.   
• We encourage the student to feel, provide validation and offer empathic connection.  This supports the recognition of difficulties and plants the seeds of motivation for change. 
• We foster acceptance and work through barriers to change.  Often a strengths-based or solution focused approach is helpful to move through goals to allow them to thrive both academically and emotionally.  
• We work with the student, their family, key members of the school team and external agencies to advocate, scaffold and support.  External involvement is based on need and whether the student consents to share their experience beyond the counselling space.   
  
   

To contact your school counsellors, email the following for each school: