BACP CYPF conference 2025
Systems around the child

We welcome you to join the CYPF conference 2025 to develop knowledge, understanding and skills for systems around the child.

The conference aims to highlight the critical role of integrating counselling into the comprehensive system that supports children's well-being. The agenda will explore the multifaceted influences on children's development and mental health, emphasising the need for diverse interventions and collaborative ways of working. Practitioners will have the opportunity to enhance their expertise and skills to achieve a holistic approach that connects the counselling process to the wider psychological wellbeing agenda of the child. Workshops will examine how children can be empowered through collaboration and how counselling can be seamlessly combined with education, healthcare, family support, safeguarding and community services.

Book your place

The CYPF conference 2025 is a hybrid event. Our hybrid events provide you with the opportunity to attend and engage both in person and online. In person attendance includes networking opportunities, lunch, refreshments and the chance to engage with divisional representatives and BACP staff. Online access includes interactive Q&A's, a chatroom to network with peers, and interactive polls.

From a single counsellor in a school perspective this presentation will talk about the instrumental role that one person can have within a school system to “activate” the systems around the child.  This presentation will set the premise of acknowledging a “culture” of the mental health profession/counselling profession, then set out a picture of where myself, as a representative of that culture, present one way of supporting a child or young person which may or may not be seen as “working together” with the many systems around the child.  Of primary focus would be both the family culture, surrounding community culture and the educational culture within the school.  This presentation will present a model of working within a Whole School Approach, to “Activate the Systems around a Child to support their mental health.”  The key points will illustrate how using empathy, relationship building, working within difference can allow cooperation and creativity around a child that can shift the systems toward greater mental health support.  A therapist within a school, who works with humility, yet confidence in the potential agency of the therapist to activate the systems toward creativity, can work within key relationships to support a child’s mental health.  This presentation will emphasise the need to take in other’s “cultures” whether it be an “educational” culture, or family culture - and work with sensitivity to others’ experiences of security and anxiety.  Only when these can be genuinely empathised with - can we, using some of what we may have come to understand about a child, work to face the challenges from the child’s perspective and begin to widen the empathy and windows of tolerance for different perspectives.  A gathering together of these perspectives, both inside and outside of the therapy room, can allow for the therapist to engage in empathic challenge and the opportunity to take in different perspectives for all involved, including the therapist.

This session is available in person and online as part of strand one.

Across the life course, our experiences in pre-natal and perinatal life, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age are inspired, connected and strengthened by the quality and nature of our relationships with others.

This idea is the basis of attachment theory, an integral component to many mental health interventions. Further, research on environmental systems, indicates that the quality of relationships in one system of life (e.g. the family) will influence and be influenced by the quality of relationships on other systems (e.g. school, the workplace).

Using client case studies as illustrations, Alison will present the evidence and research for Relate NI believing that in the case of separated parents including both parents in the assessment and review processes for their child’s counselling, leads to better outcomes for their children.

This session is available in person and online as part of strand one.

Stuart will present on the role of Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE). SPACE is a research-based intervention that empowers parents to reduce their child's anxiety symptoms, thereby enhancing the child's overall psychological wellbeing and connection with the parents.

1. Navigating the System: Equipping parents with skills to address their child's emotional needs.
2. Strengthening Systems: Boosting parental competence around navigating anxiety and fostering resilient family dynamics.
3. Lived Experience: Sharing success stories from families who have benefited from SPACE.
4. Ethics and Confidentiality: Balancing child autonomy and parental involvement in therapy.
5. Academic and Research Base: Presenting evidence supporting SPACE’s effectiveness.
6. Counselling and Psychological Wellbeing: Integrating SPACE into broader child mental health strategies.

Participants will gain actionable strategies to support anxious children and strengthen family systems, contributing to a rounded approach to child mental health care.

This session is available in person and online as part of strand one.

This session aims to elaborate on how we can understand the child's symptom in relation to the family system, school system, friends, and doctors. In particular, it aims to address the challenge of liaising and bringing together all of this information to strengthen our understanding of what the child is experiencing, and then co-creating insights with everyone in the child’s life to figure
out the best next steps for the child.
With sometimes contradictory information coming from various sources, how do we move forward?
How can we maintain confidentiality and still apprise teachers and parents of the child’s
suffering? How can we break down labels that are applied, particularly when the child is defined, in the eyes of others, by behaviour? How do we keep channels of communication open? How do we strengthen all the systems around the child, so that parents can parent and teachers can teach?
The session will aim to address these questions through a practical lens, calling directly upon Paula's experience working as a psychoanalyst offering an in-school service.

This session is available in person and online as part of strand two.

Using the childs own voice to understand on a deeper level what the young person goes through when they have experienced trauma and how this can lead them to link and experience daily events thereafter and the affects of this on their whole system.  To provide a narrative that shows the child’s journey, from being taken from a parent and entering the care system and the impact of this in terms of future placements, education, friendships, relationships etc.

To then hear from that same childs voice, but when she is older, looking back and voicing what she wished the team around her had known / taken into account for her, when decisions were made around her and how their choices affected her as she progressed in life.

To remind us of the childs voice and the impact of that on them in terms of all they carry and how the team around them needs to keep that at the forefront of all they do, including us, as therapists.

This session is available in person only as part of strand three.

The session title is borrowed from child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s quote: 'There is no such thing as an infant,' highlighting the fact that an infant is always part of a family system and patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour can be understood in relation to early experiences of attachment and separation. The session will illustrate how exploring family and developmental histories can help to contextualise presenting issues. Jeanine will draw on theoretical concepts and share practical guidance for sensitively gathering a family history. She will consider biological families as well as care experienced children and young people to include details of the birth family and/or the arrival into foster/adoptive care or residential settings. This method is traditionally included in psychodynamic models, but no prior knowledge of psychoanalytic theory will be assumed, and the session will be open and accessible to counsellors and psychotherapists from all disciplines.

This session is available in person only as part of strand three.

Rebecca and Ali aim to share their knowledge and experience of working with high need and risky adolescents in schools. By using the structure of the Brent Centre for Young People, they will explore the layers of containment needed within a system to effectively manage the risks and anxieties associated with working with adolescents.

Rebecca and Ali will reflect on the following:

• Using the concept of Concentric Circles of containment (Rustin, McLoughlin) and with reference to the diagram below, we will explore how the ideas of Bion and Winnicot can help inform ways of working within school systems and explore the role of containment within a system.
• Use case studies to highlight examples of how risk and anxiety can be contained within a system to better safeguard young people and the adults that support them.
• Share experience of working collaboratively with school staff and the network around students to effectively manage anxiety and risk, and how this can be applied to working broadly within school settings.
• Explore the difficulties of working with adolescents within a system and the different factors that impact the functioning of the system- highlighting the importance of maintaining a position of thinking within an uncontained and struggling system.

This session is available in person and online as part of strand two.

As child therapists, we recognise that child clients bring their parental relationships into the therapy space. When working through a systemic lens, we must consider many voices, including those of the parent. Both Parent-Child Systems and Parent Systems are complex and non-linear.

Viewing the parent** through a holistic lens is an imperative when considering the Child’s System.  Parental Engagement in Action encourages the child therapist to be intentional in their practices through resourcing and empowering the parent to actively support their child through the therapeutic process and beyond. 

This workshop will explore how we work alongside parents, giving them space to voice their struggles, whilst respectfully maintaining the boundary of the child’s process. Participants will be introduced to concepts from The Needs ParadoxÔ (O’Neill and McDonald, 2023), a relational framework which supports the therapist to include parent(s) as part of their child’s therapeutic process.

The aims of the session are to:

• Gain insight into Parent Systems
• Understand their role within the parent-therapist dyad
• Have an introduction to The Needs ParadoxÔ
• Have an increased awareness of the benefits of intentional practice, effecting positive change within the parent-child relationship

** “Parent” refers to any adult who has primary caregiver responsibilities for the child

This session is available in person and online as part of strand one.