Educational Psychology Services' Critical Incident Support

Since 2017, Warwickshire’s Educational Psychology Service (EPS) has provided a Critical Incident (CI) service to schools, colleges and other settings, offering support for the emotional wellbeing of an educational community when something unexpected occurs, such as the death of a peer, staff member or parent/carer, a criminal act, violent attack, or large scale incident, 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 links to resources is all that is needed but at other times we can come into school and talk to staff. While 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. 

As the current service level agreements are coming to the end of their two year cycle, schools, colleges and other settings now have the opportunity to purchase Critical Incident Insurance through a service level agreement (SLA) with the EPS.  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 50 pence 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 two years. 

The Educational Psychology Service does not want to profiteer from running CI support but it does require funding to ensure that Educational Psychologists can be made available to respond quickly.  It has been decided that at the end of the next two 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, 01926 742921 or email janetmander@warwickshire.gov.uk in order to subscribe.