The Skills Network Reviews

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I would strongly recommend people avoid these courses. I applied for a course on children's mental health, that was funded. I have just finished a master's in counselling and psychotherapy (for which I got a distinction) and I also used to teach at a University. I wanted a course talking about children's mental health, what common experiences there are, perhaps the causes of these and how to help young people. I have a psychology background and I thought it would be a good refresher. The course is terrible, its all about social work, actually it looks like a module from a social work course, rehashed as an stand alone course. I failed my first assessment because I didn't talk about social worker care plans and how they work, or design a road to recovery for a hypothetical person. First of all, we were not taught these things in the course - you had to go off and do extensive reading to understand them. This is a GCSE level course, usually these are mainly taught with a small amount of reading, not a small amount of teaching and a lot of reading - that would be more like degree level. Also, I wanted to learn about children's mental health not social work and how a social worker would deal with a child's mental health. Why would I need to write a care plan, also the road to recovery - how could you possibly know? Everyone has different roads to recover and believing that we know how that should look from a one paragraph description is just ridiculous. In fact it is teaching the wrong thing - that we know best and can 'fix' people in a certain way. The next module involved reading load and loads of legal legislation - why? I wanted to learn about children's mental health, this seemed a bit irrelevant unless - guess what, you are going to work in social work or another profession with these legal obligations. Also, my tutor was quite offensive, suggesting I needed help with maths (?? - I have a maths A-level I am fine) and English (again I have an A-level in this). Also suggested I should go and speak to their careers people - who would no doubt tell me to become a social worker. Anyway, anyone who has failed an assignment - don't feel bad. I have a PhD in psychology (which I assumed this would be mostly based on) and I failed one. I asked to be withdrawn based on the fact the course was not about children's mental health and therefore it wasn't what I needed. It is also a ridiculous amount of work with lots of deadlines close together and huge amounts of extra reading. They insisted I carry on, and when I didn't do more of the assessments they have told me I need to pay £100. This is completely unfair as the course is not what it is advertised to be. If it was advertised as how social workers work with mental health in children it would be fine, but its not. Also it had a lack of evidence backing up its points and appears to blame a 'lack of resilience' as the cause of mental health problems, essentially blaming the children themselves. Finally, the real kick in the teeth is that all the children I know involved in mental health services don't seem to have the things in place that this course suggests should be happening. So it is basically just a fantasy of how social work should be fixing everything but isn't.