The Parent Book, for your parent community

What it is

A library of chapters, quick tips, activities and self-care tools for parents, written by therapists who work with children and young people, and organised by the thing a family is actually facing rather than by category. Every subject in it has two printable pages: one that says what helps, and one that says who else can help. Both are free to anybody.

Before any of what follows, the teachers’ shelf is free. Any member of your staff with a school email address can sign in at theparentbook.com/staff today, search the whole library, and send a parent a page that says who passed it on. No licence, no fee, no procurement, and no conversation with us required. We would rather your pastoral team used it for a term and formed their own view than took our word for anything on this page.

There is no separate school version of the library, and no school partnership. Your families read what every reader reads, and anything your staff send them opens free.

What your school can use

• Free pages for every family.Every subject has a one-page pack and a signposting sheet that anyone can read and print, with no account.
• Links for what you already run.The packs, the signposting sheets and the printables are public pages, so you can link to them from your parent portal or your parent mailing.
• A teachers’ shelf for your pastoral staff.Any member of staff with a school email address can search the whole library and send a parent a single link in about thirty seconds. The page names your school as the sender and The Parent Book as the author.
• Parent evenings led by the therapists who write it.Shaped with your senior pastoral team around what your parents are dealing with this year.
• A briefing for pastoral staff.So the people holding your families know what is in the library and when to reach for it.

What it asks of you

The shelf asks nothing: a member of staff signs in and uses it. If you would like the parent evenings and the briefing as well, they ask close to nothing, on purpose, because most wellbeing initiatives fail in a school when they become somebody’s second job.

• One conversation with your senior pastoral team to shape what we lead with.
• One paragraph in a parent mailing, which we write for you and you edit.
• A link in the place your parents already look.

There is no training day and no platform to administer, and nothing is required of a form tutor unless they want it.

Who writes it

Therapists registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (NCPS), working with children, young people, parents and schools. Every chapter that touches a clinical edge carries the same crisis signposting, in the same order, drawn from a single canonical source, so nothing in the library can drift from what a school would want its parents to be told.

What it costs

An individual parent subscription is £129 a year. A parent who changes her mind in the first fourteen days is refunded in full; after that, she can cancel at any time and reads to the end of the year she has paid for. The teachers’ shelf costs the school nothing. Parent evenings and staff briefings are arranged separately, term by term, at a day rate.

What we would suggest first

Do not take our word for any of the above. Take one of the printable pages, on whatever your school is dealing with this term, and send it to a family this week. It is free, it will stay free, and it is the fairest test of whether the writing is good enough for your parents.

To begin a conversation

There is a short form at the address below, or reply to whoever sent you this. We will come back with a date, not a brochure.