It is 8.47 on a Tuesday morning, and a ten-year-old boy is sitting outside a classroom in a corridor. He has been there since registration.
He is not in trouble, exactly. He hasn’t done anything. He just wouldn’t go in.
His teacher has a class of thirty. His LSA has three other children she is responsible for. The SENCo has an EHCP annual review meeting. His parents have had the conversation with the school so many times that they have stopped calling it a conversation.
Somewhere in the system, a CAMHS referral is moving slowly through a process that will eventually produce an appointment – in perhaps eight months, perhaps fourteen – at which point a clinician will meet a child who, by then, has spent the better part of a year sitting in corridors or in their bedroom, and try to understand what happened.
We have seen this. Many times. In many corridors, in many schools.
We built the Child Therapy Service because we believe it was preventable.
We are not campaigners by temperament. We don’t speak in the language of the policy document or the conference keynote. What we do – with some precision – is describe what we have seen.
We have sat in the rooms. With the overwhelmed teachers. With the exhausted parents who have learned to dread the school run. With the children who have decided, on the basis of considerable evidence, that the safest response to the world is to shut down or kick off.
What we kept seeing, over years of practice, was the same gap. Not a gap in the children. A gap in what the adults around them could see – and therefore in what they could do.
The problem is never the child. It’s that the adults around them haven’t yet had the support to understand what they’re seeing and respond in a way that helps.
In 2017, we founded the Child Therapy Service to close that gap. A social enterprise – profit reinvested into tools and training, not extracted from them. Our target was not the child in crisis. It was the moment before the crisis.
Everything we do is built around a single premise: dysregulation is communication.
When a child refuses to enter a classroom, or screams at a teaching assistant, or goes somewhere unreachable behind their eyes, they are not, in any meaningful sense, choosing to be difficult. Their nervous system is responding to conditions that feel unsafe. The behaviour is the message.
This is not a new idea in clinical psychology. What we have done is build a practical infrastructure around it – training, tools, structured assessments, a learning portal, a cycle of review – designed to make it usable by the people who actually spend time with children.
Not only therapists. Teachers. LSAs. Parents. The adults who are there on Tuesday morning at 8.47.
We call this the BOUNCE Approach®. It works across six interconnected areas – Body-based Regulation, Openness to Connection and Safety, Understanding Sensory Differences, Navigating Emotions, Communication and Relationships, and Esteem and Identity – not as a programme you complete and move on from, but as a lens.
One that changes how you see a child – and therefore how you respond to them.
Effrosyni, a practitioner who completed our training, describes it as “a perfect mix of theory and practice – I feel inspired and ready to apply what I’ve learned.” Dr Claire Stubbs, a counselling psychologist, is more pointed: “I don’t have time as a clinician to develop creative ways of engaging children with certain topics, and Tracy has done it for me.”
What both are describing is the same thing: the difference between understanding something and being able to use it.
In September 2021, we entered a funded partnership with White Hall Academy – a primary school in an area of recognised deprivation, where many pupils carry very difficult life experiences into the classroom every morning.
The question was whether putting regulation at the centre of everything could produce real change in some of the most complex children the school supported.
It could.
Emotional regulation scores improved. Mornings got calmer. Transitions into learning – that specific, grinding daily difficulty – became smoother. Relationships between pupils and LSAs strengthened in ways staff had not anticipated.
The children called the grounding sessions “special time.”
At the end of the funded period, the school had a choice. It chose to expand the programme. That decision matters.
Heidi Alexander, Deputy Headteacher at John Grant School, puts it simply:
“The interventions have helped staff understand that behaviour is not defiance, but communication.”
The parents are a different story, and in some ways a harder one.
If the gap in provision for schools is significant, the gap for families is worse. Parents of children with complex social and emotional needs describe a particular kind of loneliness – not the acute loneliness of crisis, but the chronic loneliness of a situation nobody around them quite understands.
Between 2021 and 2023, we ran regular online coffee mornings for these families. Over two years, more than 420 families came.
Katie MacGregor was one of them.
“Just to know I’m not the only one struggling…”
Elzbieta Pecka went further. “I am not sure how I would have survived the last year…”
Jyoti describes us as “a lifeline” – and then says something worth reading slowly:
“the sense of wellbeing… is immediate and a blinding contrast to other services.”
She is not describing a therapy. She is describing being understood.
That is what we are trying to build.
The evidence, where we have it, is small in scale and meaningful in what it shows.
In 2022, we ran a funded pilot targeting tactile defensiveness. Eight families. Six completed the programme. Of those, 67% reported clear reductions in distress.
These are small numbers. We know that. But they matter.
In 2026, we launched our most ambitious project yet.
The Snapshot Impact Project is running nationally. Its mechanism is simple: a two-minute structured baseline that gives any practitioner a consistent way of seeing how a child is managing right now.
Not a clinical assessment. Not a referral. A pause.
A way of knowing what to do next – before the situation requires something more.
If you can see the problem earlier, you can act earlier.
If you act earlier, fewer children end up in crisis.
The boy in the corridor at 8.47 on a Tuesday morning.
He is not unusual. That is the point.
We are not a solution to the system. What we have built is something more specific: tools that make it possible for the adults already in the room to see what they are looking at earlier – and to act.
They are waiting for an adult who knows how to look.
We exist to make sure that adult is you.
Read more:
Get Started
