Working in Partnership. Lunch-Time Meetings in Secondary Schools

and his colleagues showed how, with the right ethos, secondary schools could be a powerful force, promoting good outcomes over a range of measures, including attend ance, exam results, behaviour in school and delinquency outside it. Inspired by this, we, at the Canterbury Department of Child and Family Psychiatry, set about the task of explor ing our interface with education, to determine how we might help to mobilise the therapeutic potential of local secondary schools for children in difficulties. Our regular clinic meetings with the Canterbury educational psychologist to discuss the problems of chil dren of mutual concern had already proved constructive. I had also happily participated for several years in in-service training courses for interested teachers, focusing particu larly on 'Why children develop conduct disorder' and 'Psychiatric aspects of children with learning difficulties'. I