Children’s Mental Health Week 2027 runs from Monday 1 to Sunday 7 February 2027. It is organised by the charity Place2Be, and the theme announced for next year is Step Into Our World, which is about empathy – seeing a situation as the child in it sees it.
That theme is close to the daily work of a children’s home. A young person’s reaction usually makes complete sense from inside their own history, even when it looks disproportionate from outside it. Staff being able to hold both of those at once is most of the job.
Our approach is therapeutic rather than a service a child is referred out to. The adults around a young person are trained to think about what sits underneath behaviour, with clinical support available to the team, and we work alongside therapists where that is right for an individual child.
A campaign week is useful for naming all of this out loud. The work it describes is the other fifty-one.