BackgroundYouth is a period of elevated risk for mental ill health, yet young people often do not receive timely support. Barriers can include high clinical thresholds for treatment and long waiting lists, as overstretched statutory services can struggle to meet high demand. The Early Support Hubs available in some parts of England are a potentially promising model to increase access to support. These are community-based services offering open-access, holistic support for 11-25-year-olds without a referral. However, there is no standardised model and considerable variation in the support offered, highlighting the need for research to explore how Early Support Hubs operate, whether they are meeting the mental health and wellbeing needs of young people, and potential areas for improvement.AimsTo explore young people's experiences of using Early Support Hubs for mental health or wellbeing support, and their views on best practice within these services.MethodsWe conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 demographically diverse young people aged 16-25 years who had used eight Early Support Hub services across England. Data were analysed using codebook thematic analysis.ResultsAspects of hubs that were valued by young people included: easy accessibility; holistic approaches which go beyond clinical interventions; a sense of community, friendship and consistency; and youth-led philosophies. Limitations of the hub model included them being little known in local areas, lack of capacity to address more acute and complex mental health needs, and the limited scale of the services.ConclusionEarly Support Hubs appear to be valued by young people and have potential to be an adjunct to clinical services to help increase access to mental health support for young people. Evidence on populations served, what support they receive, and outcomes following support are needed to assess whether there is a policy case for wider roll out.

Early Support Hubs have recently become widespread in the UK and aim to provide community-based, easy access mental health support to young people aged 11-25, integrating a variety of forms of support. Evidence is needed on the role such services aim to fulfil in addressing young people's mental health needs, perceived good practice in their operations and challenges encountered in achieving this. In order to understand this, we conducted individual interviews with 24 staff members from eight Hubs across England; data was analysed using codebook thematic analysis. Several structural-, organisational- and individual-level factors were identified, including: Hubs' service model and role in care pathway; service culture; staff characteristics, and staff and young people interactions.  The Early Support Hub model was perceived to provide a valuable and distinctive contribution to mental health support for young people, including a youth-centred and holistic approach, easy accessibility (e.g. self-referrals, no minimum thresholds for access), non-clinical service settings, and a diverse and compassionate workforce. Several constraining factors were identified, including the challenge of providing early intervention support to all young people whilst also ensuring the needs of those with significant mental health difficulties are met; short-term funding affecting sustainability, and challenges in recruiting and retaining staff with the desired qualities and values. Research is needed to further understand the Hubs' role in the system as a whole, their overall impact on addressing the rising burden of young people's mental ill health, and how well-functioning local service systems that do not result in significant gaps in provision can be established.

Early Support Hubs are an emerging model of youth mental health provision, designed to offer holistic, open-access support for young people whose needs often fall below the threshold for specialist services. Despite increased expansion in many countries, little is known about how these Hubs are implemented in practice or the challenges faced by those responsible for delivering them. This paper presents a qualitative interview study with 19 managers of Early Support Hubs in England. A codebook thematic analysis was used to explore managers' perceptions of the purpose of Early Support Hubs and factors that support or hinder effective implementation. Three overarching themes were identified. First, Hubs adopted a youth-centred, holistic ethos, characterised by open access and flexible support. Second, Hubs are balancing offers of early, brief interventions against the need for tailored/specialist support for some young people. Third, systemic factors key to effective delivery, include the need for strong inter-agency partnerships, a diverse and adaptable workforce, and sustainable funding. Early Support Hubs hold promise as an accessible, youth-led model that can plug gaps in traditional mental health systems and offer continuity across the transition into adulthood. However, these models are constrained by short-term funding cycles, workforce limitations, and rising demand from young people with more complex mental health needs. Establishing consistent service models, strengthening referral pathways, and securing long-term investment will be essential to realising the full potential of Early Support Hubs.

Effective early support for children and young people is a high priority. Early intervention approaches for young people with psychosis or eating disorders have substantial supporting evidence, but well-established approaches to delivering a prompt, effective response to young people presenting with early symptoms of anxiety and depression are lacking. We conducted a systematic review of outcomes of early interventions or approaches for young people (between 11 and 25 years) with initial symptoms of depression, anxiety and other common mental health difficulties. Five bibliographic (MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL and Web of Science Core Collection) and two grey literature (HMIC and PsycExtra) databases were searched for papers relating to youth, early intervention and common mental health problems. We conducted a narrative synthesis of models and assessed quality using CASP checklists. We included 38 studies (43 publications): of these, seven studies (in eight publications) were randomised controlled trials. RCTs were high quality but other studies tended to lack control groups and be of lower quality. Approaches broadly aimed to provide a more comprehensive and effective early response to symptom onset, with primary goals falling into one of (1) making care more comprehensive and joined up, (2) increasing speed or ease of access to support or (3) providing targeted support for specific needs in addition to anxiety and depression. Some evidence indicates that these approaches may facilitate access and reduce waiting times in the short-term, whilst decreasing burden on other mental health or emergency services. Significant improvements in mental health and wellbeing compared to controls were also reported across most studies with comparator groups, alongside high acceptability of the support offered. Overall, models of early intervention for depression and anxiety show promise in improving access, experience and outcomes of care for young people. However, high heterogeneity of interventions and outcomes measured limits certainty. More robust controlled studies are needed, alongside comprehensive details of support received by young people through the intervention, and evidence of what works for whom in which settings.

ObjectiveWhat we set out to do. This UK-based project focused on families with parental mental health difficulties. We sought to understand lived experience and co-produce recommendations for improved responses from adult mental health and children's services.MethodHow we did it. We involved six mothers and three young adult children aged 18-25. Three workshops, with parents (n = 6) and young adult children, (n = 3) focused on having or being a parent with mental health difficulties and receiving support. Three experts by experience became co-authors.FindingsWhat we found. Themes of Communication, Judgement and Kindness, and Parenting were identified from the workshops and reflected a wish for service improvements through interpersonal skills, including communication and kindness. Feeling judged negatively impacts families' honesty and engagement. Young people actively shorten visits frpm professionals they do not trust. Mental health difficulties often occur in combination with multiple family health issues.DiscussionWhat we think about what we found. Service parameters compartmentalise individuals as either patient, parent, carer or child, rather than engaging with whole family systems. This paper shows (a) how this compartmentalisation causes more stress and (b) how asking about experience might encourage, or discourage, trust. The findings may be relevant to other patient groups.ConclusionOur final thoughts. Person-centred communication, kindness and respect for the parent-child relationships, without judgement, are needed in improving services for these families.

This paper explores parents' narratives about encountering moralized expectations of parenting. We contribute original and significant findings which identify moralized judgement as a determinant between concealing potential child maltreatment and help-seeking to support child protection and welfare. We adopted a rigorous plural qualitative approach of interpretative phenomenological analysis and narrative analysis of N = 24 parents in England, who had experienced parenting support from children's services. Participants revealed that moral judgements from their birth families and child's school were particularly relevant. While fear of moral judgement deterred parents from open dialogue, feeling accepted and valued enabled greater self-efficacy and acceptance of support needs.

Despite recent improvements in approaches to supporting young carers, including legislative changes, schools continue to face challenges in supporting young carers' varied needs. This research aimed to understand the perceptions and experiences of teachers and school staff who support young carers in schools within England, through pastoral processes, and multi-agency working while addressing key challenges in identifying young carers and engaging them in available support. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse interview data from 18 participants. Three main themes were identified: School Resources, School Processes, and Young Carer Identity. These highlighted a need to raise awareness of the core themes in the experiences of young carers, lobbying for improved statutory protection and promoting young carers' voices. Furthermore, whilst it is widely accepted that young carers are a 'hidden' group, teachers in this study also felt that those who provide care and support to young carers and their families can be both unknown and unacknowledged.

There is evidence that research involving young people in conceptual stages of the design can be empowering, leading to a sense of personal agency, sustainable outcomes, interventions and resilience. Yet, despite calls for greater involvement of young people in services that affect them, in reality this is often tokenistic or a 'tick box' exercise. This article presents the findings from a practical 'on-the-ground' project, drawing on visual methods and coproduction with young people enrolled in a social-emotional and behavioural difficulties school in the UK and practitioners, to gain insight into how they make sense of their mental health. Applying coproduction, our approach was centred around the process of knowledge production, rather than 'data gathering'. With this in mind, we adopted two mutual and reciprocal phases, the steering group phase and the knowledge production phase, consisting of young people, practitioners and researchers. Results highlight visual methods, in this case drawing/doodling on tablecloths, enabled young people to articulate implicit emotions and affective experiences. Whilst this study does not offer a 'standard model of coproduction', by framing coproduction within critical realist ontology and positioning theory, we have come some way in addressing issues around power imbalance and reciprocity.

This scoping review has investigated experiences of children and parents encountering in-patient treatment for serious childhood illness, including current or potential use of technology as a support mechanism. The research questions were 1. What do children experience during illness and treatment? 2. What do parents experience when their child is seriously ill in hospital? 3. What tech and non-tech interventions support children's experience of in-patient care? The research team identified n = 22 relevant studies for review through JSTOR, Web of Science, SCOPUS and Science Direct. A thematic analysis of reviewed studies identified three key themes reflecting our research questions: Children in hospital, Parents and their children, and Information and technology. Our findings reflect that information giving, kindness and play are central in hospital experiences. Parent and child needs in hospital are interwoven and under researched. Children reveal themselves as active producers of pseudo-safe spaces who continue to prioritise normal child and adolescent experiences during in-patient care.

We write as a collaborative mode of embodied writing that moves, tags, and re-sites us elsewhere, that mis/dis/aligns self-other, and permeates various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We write as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions and writing become in the doing. Different relational collective practices shared here disturb, disperse, question, undo and undermine sole authorship and consider how tags work and what tags might produce when these objects/things shape our academic lives. While engaged in tagging we also considered how tags tug, how tags shape the ways we think, feel and experience our academic lives. How are we produced by tags? What do tags produce (in/on) us and in our embodied lives?

The Covid-19 pandemic brought seismic changes to children and families, with schools at the forefront of the daily battle to maintain learning. We report on our reflexive thematic analysis of data collected with 28 participants in 14 schools in England during the summer of 2021, following two extensive national lockdowns, and two transition points of returning to school under Covid safety measures. Our data reflects an emerging narrative ecology of Schools-in-Covid, developing as the pandemic continued to unfold for children and families, schools, policy makers and ourselves, in a co-construction of what this pandemic has brought to our lives. We present our findings as a reportage, as our collective experience continues to unfold. Our superordinate themes re-position the UK Government priority of academic catch up as secondary to mental health, and argue the re-establishment of the hidden curriculum was the main vehicle for social and emotional learning (SEL) and wellbeing through direct instruction, modelling and practice, typically associated with improved attitudes about the self, others and school and with consequential higher attainment. We report a partial inversion of expectations; rather than a heavy emphasis towards widening disadvantage, our participants report some benefit to vulnerable children and young people who gained from a changed in-person learning environment, and overwhelming distress to those deemed less vulnerable. Our findings identify Schools in the Community, Care before Curriculum, Agility (adapt, survive and thrive), and Reflective and Responsive, as the key aspects of an emerging narrative ecology of Schools-in-Covid.

This article presents our Family Stories model identifying self-reported change behaviours and environments by families developed from our two-phase research in an inner-city area in the south of England. The research focused on parents whose families had experienced complex issues affecting the behaviour, wellbeing, learning and/or safety of children, and who had received social care support from services that had broadly adopted a trauma-informed approach. We identified parents’ self-reported change behaviours and environments, in the context of the high rate of families relapsing and returning for multiple episodes of support. We also identify key challenges to securing long-term positive change, including the barriers to nurturing a strong and successful parenting identity, in which parents are more able to sustain positive change. Our model identifies four enablers, evident in the self-reported change behaviours narrated by our participants: community, allyship, strategy and mastery.

Professional curiosity is vital in early intervention and in keeping children safe from abuse and neglect, its significance has been a recurrent theme in inquiries into child abuse and neglect in the UK over the last decade. However, there is a notable lack of research into the lived experience of practitioners in being professionally curious with parents and carers, perhaps particularly so regarding practitioners in schools, who hold significant safeguarding responsibilities, as part of a wider landscape of services responsible for keeping children safe. We present a qualitative empirical study into the lived experience of practitioners in pastoral support roles in schools across two local authorities in England. We found that professional curiosity was a highly emotive concept for participants, characterised by a myriad of emotional responses, support which appears inconsistent, expressed as a question of 'luck'. Professional identity was found to be deeply significant in enacting curious practice, but this existed in a spectrum from determined and compassionate, to rejection of the need for curiosity and in these examples we also found othering, and less compassion for families. Overall, we call for consistent support for practitioners required to employ professional curiosity, both in terms of the emotional labour in this work, and the transition to seeing family orientated practice as part of the key function of their role.

This article explores the psychological impact of growing up with a parent with a mental illness. A life course Model of Acquiescence is developed to show how coping strategies developed by children go on to have impact into adulthood.Undertaking biographical narrative interviews with 20 adults who had grown up with a parent with a mental illness produced accounts from childhood to the current day. Thematic narrative analysis was used to gain insight into how the participants made sense of their parent's mental illness and their own role within it.Participants recalled experiences and family circumstances that were traumatic, unsafe and overwhelming. They dealt with these by attributing adversities to the mental illness and focusing solely on the vulnerabilities of their parents, thus adopting a caring role and ignoring their own needs. Most presented themselves as resilient, adaptable and resourceful, in employment and with intact relationships. However, despite this apparent success, all expressed a profound sense of lost opportunity and low self-esteem.In the Model of Acquiescence, we illustrate how and why children adapt to challenging and complex family experiences and explain how the personal and interpersonal process of parentification develops. An individual positions themselves as insignificant, powerless and silenced, only able to affect change or maintain relationships by anticipating, identifying and meeting other people's needs. This model underlines the need to support such children's psychological wellbeing using a whole family approach to understand the impact of parental mental illness and centre the child's needs.

Recognition and support for young carers has improved steadily in the past two decades; with stronger legislation and more visibility and awareness of the challenges that many of the YC face, especially with respect to their education. Recent UK-based initiatives providing toolkits and guidance for school staff have provided much needed direction for schools, to support the loosely defined statutory requirements. The aim of the current research was to hear from school staff about their experiences in identifying and supporting young carers, to better understand any enablers and barriers. The thematic analysis of the interview data from 18 school staff was organized into two main themes: perceptions regarding the characteristics of young carers; and perceptions regarding the importance of home–school communication. Each superordinate theme contained several sub-themes. Overall, the teachers perceived many difficulties identifying young carers who did not volunteer this information and felt that the main enabler of identification was the trust relationships between the school and the pupil and parents. Once identified, the schools perceived the main areas of need that they could provide support for were the emotional wellbeing of the pupils and additional academic opportunities. They spoke too of the difficulties balancing the provision of this extra support within the constraints of the school context, both in terms of the school day, and the competing priorities relating to academic and social–emotional needs. School staff recognized that extra time outside of school was difficult for young carers to attend. Other subthemes are discussed with consideration to enablers and barriers. The implications for the dissemination of good practice, and addressing policy are considered.

: In April 2022, our worlds collided at the Stellenbosch University, in Cape Town, South Africa. Twenty researchers and pracademics, from across the globe, convened at an experiential workshop entitled, “ Power, trust, and community: Feminist perspectives and participatory arts-based research in challenging environments”. We envisioned a moment in time, as ‘ the third sphere’ (Dierckx, Hendricks, et al., 2020), where the academic community, artists, private sectors, policy and decision makers, and the public, could come together to share knowledge about how we do research, specifically participatory research, in challenging (sometimes violent) environments, and how to deal with our own challenges and vulnerabilities we may find ourselves in and around. For a week we participated in engaging collective imaginations, community visits, experimenting with creative methods, and deep introspection and reflection. Flowing from the workshop we co-produced a booklet with our collective-reflective-collaborative writing and ar tworks entitled, “ Doing fieldwork in challenging circumstances: Summoning participatory methods ”. We turned our gaze inwards to answer questions related to how we navigate fieldwork in challenging circumstances, what sort of spaces we create when collaborating with community members and how we shift from an academic to a community-based environment. We experimented with new lines of inquiry about how to work in challenging conditions and what it meant to be stigmatized or experience violence, both from a mental and a physical point of view. We moved further into the need for a space for reflection and to acknowledge that we had multi-layered experiences, accepted that our discomfort produced learning, and that the output - both personal and academically – were multifaceted. This presentation will share our reflections and lessons learnt of our vulnerabilities, challenges, engagements with communities, experiences of learning and sharing new creative methods, and how we can summon the power of participatory research to do fieldwork in challenging circumstances. This project was financed by the Belgian Government and KU Leuven VLIR-UOS in the context of the Global Minds Open Faculty Projects to support mobility from North to South or vice versa.

Harm reduction has become increasingly influential in drug policy and practice, but has developed primarily around adult drug use. Theoretical, practical, ethical and legal issues pertaining to children and adolescents under the age of majority - both relating to their own use and the effects of drug use among parents or within the family - are less clear. This commentary proposes a sub-field of drug policy at the intersection of harm reduction and childhood which we refer to as 'child-centred harm reduction'. We provide a definition and conceptual model, as well as illustrative questions that emerge through a child-centred harm reduction lens. Many people in different countries are already working on these kinds of issues, whose work needs greater recognition, analysis and support. In beginning to name and define this sub-field we hope to improve this situation, and inspire further international debate, collaboration, and innovation.

This paper was first presented at the Psychology of Education Section conference in 2021. It has resulted from a collection of works under the moniker Family Stories, which investigates lived experiences of, and support for, families with complex social care and health needs. This specific piece of work looked at school responses to those families using reflexive thematic analysis to investigate the perspectives of school leaders and pastoral staff, through an inductive approach leading to the interpretation of data into themes. At focus here are the three themes which relate specifically to the emotional labour of school staff in engaging with safeguarding issues: We are so lucky here; School never closes a case; and Your life, consumed. Amid a very strong finding that participants reflected a strong, mutually supportive environment on which they indicated their co-dependence, there also appears to be a distinct lack of reflective support for headteachers, in particular, in managing safeguarding decisions and supporting staff with the emotional impact of that work.

This study engaged children as research allies throughout the research process from developing research questions to authorship. Our approach recognises children's right to participation under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child by developing a form of inquiry that invited children's critique of adult knowledge and authority. The project was fully co-constructed with children, with adults who guided them through planning, analysis and authorship. We discuss our reflections on the children's lived experience of Allyship itself, with the issues raised by children in focus groups and interviews illuminating this methodological approach. We conclude that children see and accept adult failings and seek to contribute to social worlds, and that these priorities have been enacted in their lived experience of this project. Our approach provides a platform for further endeavours in Allyship with children in the fields of qualitative psychology and childhood studies.Words; 146

We present an original phenomenological study conducted with a local authority Early Help and Prevention social care team, in which we investigated the lived experience of parents and practitioners of young people who misuse drugs amid a practice agenda focused on harm reduction. Our findings reflect practitioners' lived experience of direct work with young people and parents, and parents' approach to their risk-taking children. Our data identifies key concerns reflecting wider social discourse surrounding young people, in particular; the juxtaposition of adolescents as both vulnerable children, and agentic risk-takers, in the context of children's rights, and the role of adults in young lives. Our findings indicate a complex position amid multifactorial needs, risk, and offending behaviour, and reveals tensions between professionally driven harm reduction approaches, versus parents' attempts to control and protect their children, and highlight the complex transition made may protective adults as agentic adolescents forge their life chances.