Brentwood Catholic Children's Society

General information

At bccs we believe that every child should be loved and cared for. However, some children experience great hardship and suffering - from bereavement to bullying, from anxiety to abuse. bccs provides counselling for children and young adults whose wellbeing, and mental and emotional health, could be at risk. We employ qualified and dedicated Social Workers and counselling staff to deliver a caring service, structured and intensive where necessary. Often, we deal with a child’s issues long before any other agency would have processed the administration to enable a child to be cared for. Our unique approach is to intervene as soon as problems are identified and work with the children for as long as it takes to put things right.

bccs cares for over 1,600 new children each year and will be caring for around 3,500 at any one time. We work in partnership with over 100 schools and provide our service on site at school; teachers and support staff are ideally placed to spot a child who is experiencing problems and our relationship with them facilitates almost immediate care.

At bccs our biggest undertaking is the one-to-one work we do in schools with children. However, this is not right for every child, and we are now in a positon to widen the suite of services we offer. We have devised and developed a new model for the future which offers consultations in response to the increasing and complex demand schools and staff are facing. We are also running a series of workshops to help teachers think about children’s emotional health and wellbeing and the factors which influence a child’s ability to relate and learn. In the future we are also looking to run twilight courses about the importance of teacher wellbeing and parenting courses in partnership with local children’s centres.

The schools we partner with are a mix of Secondary and Primary, Catholic and non-Catholic in the county of Essex and the London boroughs of Barking & Dagenham, Havering, Newham, Redbridge and Waltham Forest. We work in areas of high deprivation, and in addition to this 70% of the schools where we work are Catholic schools - on average Catholic schools contain pupils from lower than average areas of deprivation for the place where they are sited. Catholic schools also contain a far greater ethnic and socio economic mix than average so we reach an incredibly wide spectrum of children. The work we do not only benefits the children we work with directly but also their families, the whole school and local community.