Place2Be

Who we are

Place2Be is the leading children's mental health charity providing in-school support and expert professional development to improve the emotional wellbeing of children and young people, families, teachers and school staff. The charity currently provides an embedded mental health service in 500 UK primary and secondary schools supporting a school community of around 243,000 children and young people.

Our teams provide a range of services in our partner schools to build resilience early in life through counselling, creative work and play and support a child’s ability to engage in school life. Our work, focused on early intervention, is part of the comprehensive CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) system.

Through our professional development programme, we are training around 1,200 Counsellors on Placement each year who build their mental health and counselling skills and experience through practice in our partner schools. We also provide a range of professional development programmes on mental health and wellbeing for school leaders, teachers and other professionals who work with children and young people, so we can help to build ‘mentally healthy’ schools and communities where all children can thrive and flourish.

We continue to pilot, trial and explore new ways in which we can develop our practice as well as share learning, expertise and findings from the robust evidence and evaluation we gather. HRH The Princess of Wales is our Royal Patron and Place2Be is one of the founding charity partners of Heads Together. We also work collaboratively with a range of charities and expert organisations to leverage best-in-class knowledge and expertise to inform, develop and improve outcomes for the children, families and schools we support. We ask our staff team to share our core values of perseverance, integrity, compassion and creativity, and to have the skills and patience to support some of the UK’s most vulnerable children and families.

Our culture and values

Our values:

We believe that how we approach our work is as important as the work itself. Our four key values shape everything we do: 

Compassion – We bring empathy and kindness to all we do, to better understand and meet the needs of children and young people, colleagues and other stakeholders.

Integrity – We demonstrate sound ethical values in all our work, and we are honest, transparent, courageous and authentic.

Perseverance – We have the courage to continue in the face of adversity and do this with determination to find effective solutions.

Creativity – We bring an open-minded approach and flexibility to our thinking and actions and enable others to do the same.