Our Psychosocial Support Framework

Academic support alone is often not enough. Many students we work with are managing stress, grief, family disruption or other pressures that affect their ability to learn — and those needs deserve a structured, consistent response, not an improvised one.

This framework sets out how our team identifies a student who may need psychosocial support, whether through a teacher's referral, a mentor's observation, or a student self-reporting difficulty, and the steps that follow: an initial conversation, an assessment of need, and a plan agreed with the student and, where appropriate, their family.

Where a student's needs go beyond what our team can offer directly, the framework sets out how we refer to qualified local counselling or health services, and how we follow up to confirm that referral led to actual support.

We built this framework because welfare support without a clear process risks being inconsistent — reaching some students well and missing others entirely. A documented framework also means any new staff member or partner organisation can understand exactly how we work.

This document is reviewed periodically as our programme grows and as we learn from what has and hasn't worked in practice.

Draft content — figures, quotes and dates on this page are placeholders for the programme team to review, verify and finalise before publishing.