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Department of Psychology

Campus der Universität Bielefeld — © Universität Bielefeld

SchulBasis - School-based support for children from refugee families

Project to develop & establish school-based screenings, support & referral structures for children from families with a history of flight

Current crises and conflicts are forcing people around the world to leave their homes and flee to other countries. Almost half of the refugees are children. They are exposed to a high level of stress due to their experiences before and during their flight, difficult conditions in shared accommodation centres and the many new challenges they face. There is often a lack of needs-orientated support services or fixed contact options to offer children the psychosocial support they need. In our project, we want to work together with schools to create services to improve the care of refugee children.

Our co-sponsors from the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund also present the project on their website, on their Instagram profile and in a LinkedIn post.

Further project information

Our project consists of three important areas:

Needs assessment through interviews with children, carers and professionals

We want to find out how refugee children and their families are doing, what psychosocial support is needed and what barriers make it difficult to access support. We are interested in the perspective of the children and their carers as well as the perspective of professionals.

Training professionals to recognise children's needs and offer low-threshold support

We train specialists at schools so that they can more easily assess children's stress levels and their need for support (so-called screenings) and offer these children an initial low-threshold group support programme. We monitor and evaluate the establishment of the screenings and the support programme.

Strengthening a support network for schools and troubled children

In order to facilitate the utilisation of support services, we would like to strengthen the networking of institutions. Our aim is to provide schools with direct points of contact for psychosocial support and psychotherapy for children in need of support and to strengthen cooperation between institutions.

Information for families

Download info sheet families: Info sheet_families
Download contact sheet families: Kontaktblatt_Familien-6.pdf

Information for professionals

General project information for professionals: Flyer_Fachkräfte
Information on the family interviews for professionals: Flyer_WP1
Information on the training programme for professionals in schools: Flyer_WP2
If you are interested in our training programme for professionals in schools, please contact us by email (schulbasis@uni-bielefeld.de) or contact Bahadir Uyanik directly (bahadir.uyanik@uni-bielefeld.de)
Information on specialist counselling: will follow here shortly

Bielefeld Network Conference

It takes a whole village to care for children - or a strong network.

It is precisely this network that we wanted to make visible and, above all, stronger at our network conference - how can we work together to improve the care of children with a history of flight?

On 18 February 2016, over 60 committed Bielefeld professionals from the care of children with a refugee background came together to strengthen our joint network. There were exciting inputs: a presentation on a best-practice example that was awarded the Baden-Württemberg Integration Prize, which involves so-called health mentors in the provision of care, and a presentation on the initial results and insights of the SchulBasis project. The centrepiece of the conference was then our "World Café" workshops, in which we exchanged ideas and discussed various topics such as overcoming language barriers, sustainably strengthening our network or the possibilities of health mentors in Bielefeld. Here the results of the workshops are documented.

We would like to thank all participants for coming and contributing to the success and the collaborative and open atmosphere of the conference.

Have we piqued your interest and would you like to come to one of our network conferences in OWL in the future? Then please contact us at schulbasis@uni-bielefeld.de.

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