BA(Hons) Child and Family: Mental Health modules
Each module has been crafted to ensure a careful balance between vocational and theoretical, conceptual components and you are encouraged throughout your journey with us, to apply your learning to your own workplace or voluntary context.
Please note that optional modules will be run on a demand only basis to ensure quality of teaching and learning experience. Please read our terms and conditions for more detailed information.
Year One
Foundations of Wellbeing
This module recognises the significance of wellbeing - both our own and that of the families we work with. We will begin by focusing on individual, academic and professional wellbeing and then we will expand outward to consider wellbeing in families, communities, as well as workplaces.
Individual and Community Lifespan Development
This module supports students to explore the lifespan development of individuals and families within a community context. Topics include pre-natal development and parental wellbeing. This module supports students to become adaptable and flexible in their response to persistent inequalities that impact upon human development across the lifespan.
Health and Welfare Policy Making and Service Delivery
A key feature of this module is the opportunity to utilise a rights-based approach to consider child and family policy initiatives. This module focuses on topics such as the voices of children and families in policy-making and the broader national and global policy context and influences surrounding local policies. This module directly connects to workplace practice by supporting students to consider their own place and that of families, within the policy eco-system.
Year Two
Early Intervention and Holistic Care
This module focuses on topics such as intervention, holistic family support, parental and infant mental health, as well as crime and violence. This module directly connects to workplace practice by supporting students appreciate the value of a holistic, ecologically-minded approach to working with children and families, as well as the confidence and skills necessary to engage with them to determine the effectiveness of the services they receive.
Evidence-Based Practice for Child and Family Support
Within this module, we champion the achievement of best practice by taking an evidence-based approach. This includes emphasising the value of practitioner expertise and knowledge of the best external research, and evaluation-based evidence in order to support decision-making in effective, whole-family support. A key feature of this module is the opportunity to examine the role of community partnerships and collaborative working in the development of high-quality practice, as well as to design your own research proposal.
Integrated Positive Practice in Mental Health and Wellbeing
This module supports students to explore multi-dimensional approaches to mental health and wellbeing and contemporary debates towards integrated positive practices. Within this module we explore the promotion of positive approaches towards a life well lived, and students will be able to appreciate the multidimensional nature of mental health and well-being across the lifespan.
Year Three
Developing Trauma-Informed Practice with Families
This module supports students to develop an understanding of trauma and how it manifests across the lifespan, as well as the potential impact of trauma on engagement between the child or family and the practitioner. Students will explore the principles of trauma-informed approaches to working with children and families across the life course. The module will encourage students to analyse the prevalence of trauma and its influence on emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing of children and families.
Applied Community Practice - optional module
This module enables students who work or volunteer in an educational, health or social care setting the opportunity to integrate their theoretical learning with professional practice in their community. Students can either undertake their work-based learning within their current workplace or in an alternative setting. For students on the mental health pathway, the setting should relate to work in broad contexts of mental health and/or wellbeing.
Global Perspectives of Mental Health - optional module
This module supports students to examine how mental health is understood and how mental distress is treated globally. We will be reflective of the determinants of mental health. This includes individual attributes, but also cultural, economic and environmental factors, whilst paying attention to the values of children and families, theories and professional perspectives that inform global, national and local actions.
Leadership in Strengths-Based, Family-Focused Practice
Within this module, we will examine strengths-based approaches to leadership, in which the signature strengths of the families and colleagues we work with are embraced in order to ensure conditions that enable them to flourish. This module also promotes the critical role of equality, diversity and inclusion within leadership teams from a global and local level in community-based projects. Upon completion of this module, students will be able to demonstrate their understanding of the importance of advocating for children, families and adults through effective and sustainable leadership.
Year Four
Research Design, Practice and Ethics
This module encourages students to identify their role as a researcher - which forms an integral part of their professional identity. In addition, this module supports students to examine ethical principles for research and the centrality of the voice of children and families in matters concerning them.
Investigating Child and Family Health and Wellbeing
Within this module, you will utilise your insight gained from across the course, and you will design and conduct a study relating to child and family mental health that provides a vision for the future. Upon completion of this module, students will be able to demonstrate, through their study, the significance of championing children and families in all aspects of mental health which will be showcased in a Course Celebration Ceremony and Conference.
