Something has changed and stayed changed
Every child has bad fortnights. It is the change that persists past about six weeks, across more than one setting, that is worth a conversation.
For parents & carers
You do not have to be certain before you pick up the phone.
Most parents who contact us start by apologising for wasting our time. Almost none of them are. This page is the information you would otherwise have to ask three awkward questions to get.
Straight answers
- No GP referral needed.
- £65 a session; six reduced-fee places at £30.
- Usually 2–4 weeks to a first meeting.
- You will not be told everything your child says.
When it is worth asking
Signs that a conversation might help
None of these are diagnostic. They are the patterns that come up again and again on first phone calls.
The strategies that used to work have stopped
You are more consistent, more patient and more informed than you were a year ago, and things are worse. That is usually a sign the difficulty is not about parenting technique.
They are managing school and falling apart at home
Very common, very exhausting, and often misread by everyone. Holding it together all day has a cost, and you are where the cost gets paid.
Something happened
A death, a diagnosis, a separation, an accident, a move, a frightening thing they saw. Children often look fine for months and then not fine.
You have found something that scared you
A message, a mark, a search history, a note. You do not need to know what it means before you ring.
The whole house has organised itself around one child
Meals, mornings, siblings and weekends all bending around avoiding one thing. That pattern is worth interrupting even when nobody is in crisis.
Earlier is easier. Almost nothing on this list is best handled by waiting to see whether it gets worse.
Referral, plainly
How a family actually gets from worried to working
No referral letter, no triage, no forms before you have spoken to a person.
Scroll sideways, or use the arrow keys
You call or write
Mel takes some basic details — your child’s age, roughly what is going on, and how to reach you. She is not a therapist and will not ask you to explain everything twice.
Usually answered within one working day
A free call with a therapist
About twenty minutes. This is where the real decision gets made: whether therapy is the right thing, and who here would be right.
Free · no obligation
A first meeting
For under-12s, we meet you without your child. For teenagers, they usually come alone from the start and you have a separate conversation with us.
50 minutes · £75
Sessions start
Weekly, same day, same time, same therapist. We ask for a run of at least six before anyone judges whether it is working.
50 minutes · £65
You are kept in the loop
Parent reviews every four to six sessions for younger children, less often for teenagers. Themes and practical suggestions, never a transcript.
Included in the fee
A planned ending
Counted down over the last three or four sessions. If therapy is not helping, we will be the ones to say so.
And you can come back
The difficult bit
What you will be told, and what you will not
This is the part parents find hardest, so we would rather be clear about it before you start than halfway through.
You will always know
- That your child attended
- The themes of the work, in general terms
- Whether we think it is helping
- Anything your child agrees we can pass on
- Practical things that would help at home
- Any concern about safety
You will not get
- A summary of what was said
- Your teenager’s disclosures relayed back
- Their drawings or writing without their agreement
- A verdict on your parenting
- A diagnosis — we do not make them
Why we hold that line
A child who suspects the session gets reported home will edit everything they say, and you will have paid for a very expensive hour of politeness. The privacy is not there to exclude you — it is the mechanism by which the work does anything at all. Where you need to know something in order to help, we will find a way to tell you that your child can live with.
Safeguarding
There is one thing that overrides confidentiality.
If we believe a child is at risk of significant harm, we act. That is a legal duty and every registered therapist in the country works to it.
In practice this is rarer and less dramatic than parents imagine. It usually means a conversation with you first. Occasionally it means a call to children’s social care in Gloucestershire, and where it is safe and sensible to do so, we tell you before we make it.
We explain all of this to your child at the start, in words they can understand, so that nothing that happens later feels like a betrayal.
Something people do not expect
Sometimes the most useful appointment is yours, not theirs.
Joanna works with parents and carers on their own — sometimes for three sessions, sometimes longer. Foster carers, adoptive parents, kinship carers, and parents of children waiting for an assessment make up much of her week.
It is not a consolation prize for a child who refuses to come. For children under about seven it is frequently the more effective route, because the change happens in the sixteen hours a day they are with you rather than the one hour a week they are with us.
More about JoannaMoney
What it costs, on the same page as everything else
| What | Fee |
|---|---|
| First phone callAround 20 minutes, with a therapist. To work out whether we are the right place, and what might help. | Free |
| First meeting50 minutes. For parents, or for a young person coming on their own. | £75 |
| Ongoing session50 minutes, usually weekly at the same time. | £65 |
| Family session75 minutes, often with two therapists in the room. | £110 |
| Parent consultation50 minutes, without your child present. | £75 |
Six reduced-fee places at £30 are held each week. There is no means test and no form — you ask, and Mel tells you whether one is free.
Full fees, cancellations and FAQsQuestions parents ask us
How do I know if this is serious enough?
You do not have to know. That is what the free phone call is for. We would far rather talk to twenty parents and tell fifteen of them that this looks like an ordinary hard patch, than have five of them wait another year because they did not want to make a fuss.
What if my child refuses to come?
Then do not drag them. Come yourself instead — a parent consultation changes more than people expect, because the person with the most influence over a child's week is usually not the therapist. If your child later decides they want to come, the door is open and nobody mentions the refusal.
Should both parents come, if we are separated?
Where it is possible, yes — separately if that is easier. A child who senses that one parent disapproves of therapy will spend the sessions managing that instead of using them. Priya does a lot of work with separated parents specifically.
Do you talk to schools?
Only with your written consent, and only when it will change something. A twenty-minute call with a head of year can turn a week around. We charge £65 an hour for meetings and reports, and we tell you the likely cost before we do it.
What about CAMHS — should we be waiting for them instead?
If your child is already in CAMHS, tell us; running two pieces of therapy at once rarely helps. If you are on a waiting list, work with us does not remove you from it, and we are glad to be the thing that happens in the meantime. We are not a substitute for a psychiatric assessment and we will say so if that is what is needed.
Can I read the notes?
You can ask, and for younger children we will normally go through them with you. For young people over about 13 we would ask them first — their consent matters, and disclosure without it damages the work. See privacy & records.
A twenty-minute call, and then you decide
In the real version of this practice you would ring, or send a few lines through the form, and Mel would call you back. You would not be committing to anything by finding out.