Educational Psychology Service’s Critical Incident Support

29/03/2019

In the event of a critical incident please phone 01926 742921.

A business support assistant will take your details and an outline of the incident. You will be contacted by an Educational Psychologist who will discuss the situation with you, provide immediate advice and agree a course of action.

Warwickshire’s Educational Psychology Service (EPS) has provided Critical Incident (CI) support to schools over a considerable number of years. Since 2017 schools, colleges and other settings have been invited to purchase critical incident cover. Thank you to those of you who have continued to support this arrangement.

Critical incidents can include a sudden or unexpected incident that has a serious impact on the emotional well-being of an educational community such as the death of a child / young person, death of a member of staff or parent / carer, criminal acts, violent attack, or large scale incidents, such as a fire etc.

Thankfully such incidents are relatively rare but the EPS continues to respond to requests several times each year; sometimes a telephone call or email advice and resources is all that is needed but at other times we can come into school and talk to staff. It is recognised that the best people to support children and young people immediately after experiencing grief or trauma are the adults that they know and trust. We offer support, including follow-up where necessary, to ensure that those adults feel confident in supporting the child or young person in your setting. By their very nature these CI events usually take us by surprise and feedback suggests that our support has been valued at these difficult times.

As the current service level agreements are coming to the end of their 2 year cycle, schools colleges and other settings now have the opportunity to purchase Critical Incident Insurance through a service level agreement (SLA) with the Educational Psychology Service. In order to ensure a rapid and timely response we encourage settings to take out the Critical Incident insurance; we request a payment which is based on 50p per pupil per year, up to a maximum cost for any setting of £250 per year. To reduce administration time and costs, the cover runs for 2 years.

The Educational Psychology Service does not want to profiteer from running CI support but it does need funds to ensure that Educational Psychologists can be made available to respond quickly. It has been decided that at the end of the next 2-year period (2019 - 2021) any unspent Critical Incident subscription will be used to deliver training, open to those schools who subscribed (whether they needed support during that period or not).

Please contact Janet Mander, Office Manager for EPS in order to subscribe

Tel : 01926 742921

Email :  janetmander@warwickshire.gov.uk