The war in Ukraine has led to 5.7 million people fleeing abroad, of whom 1.8 million are children (at least as many other Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes but remain in the country). By July 2024 an estimated 210,000 Ukrainians had come to the UK because of the conflict.

CAST set out to help with the mental health and well-being needs of displaced Ukrainians. There was no additional funding available to meet their needs from the NHS but Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea local authorities provided some pump-priming funding to allow CAST to develop a service.

Crucial to the programme has been a tripartite cross-agency partnership involving local authorities, CAST and St Mary’s Ukrainian School https://stmarysukrschool.co.uk/

St Mary’s is a long-established supplementary school which, before the war, provided additional teaching and social support in the evenings and weekends to Ukrainian children living in the UK. These were the children of the long-established UK Ukrainian community which grew up after the Second World War and also the children of more recently arrived Ukrainians working in the UK. It aimed to help children to integrate into UK society and back into Ukrainian society (and the educational system there).

When Ukrainians started to arrive in the UK after the Russian invasion in 2022 St Mary’s took on Ukrainian teachers who had come to the UK to act as education support workers, teaching in St Mary’s but also providing outreach into British schools to check on the wellbeing of displaced Ukrainian children and to ensure their needs are met. A combination of the school’s fundraising and funding from Westminster local authority provided the money needed to provide the service. CAST formed a partnership with St Mary’s and the local authorities to provide specialist mental health advice and support to the programme.

More recently the UK government’s Ministry of Housing and Local Government has provided funding for St Mary’s, and through them CAST, to allow the programme to be extended beyond the initial two boroughs to cover eight local authorities in London and South East England. Further expansion is under active discussion.

The core programme had several key elements:

· St Mary’s education support workers (ESWs) provide first language input into Ukrainian children going to schools, talking to the children and liaising with the school about any concerns the school may have.

· CAST trained ESWs to collect standardised information on mental health and wellbeing including looking for probable psychological trauma using brief standardised international scales. It also provided supervision through a Ukrainian-speaking psychologist who has now transferred to the school but continues to work closely with CAST.

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