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Wednesday, August 7, 2024


Rob Swarbrick, Day Centre Manager at Streetlife, talks about the impact that funded mental health training, paid for by the Training Fund for his team has had on the support they are able to provide for young people in Blackpool.

The Need

Streetlife are a youth work charity based in Blackpool, who support young people in the region who are facing or experiencing homelessness. They have both an eight-bed emergency shelter, and a day centre, from which they meet and support around 300 young people each year. The team work with young people to support them towards moving to stable homes, as well as supporting them with their physical and mental health needs. 

In recent years, they have experienced a considerable increase in the number of young people they’re seeing who are struggling with their mental health, and with increasingly complex needs. Though there is an in-house therapist on the team, they do not have capacity to support all the young people all the time, and so Streetlife identified that the training would be useful to upskill the team of youth workers to support the therapist.  

Accessing the training for the NLP diploma meant that the whole team were able to confidently support the growing number of young people they are seeing who are dealing with mental ill-health. The training taught staff to more confidently pick up on and respond to the visual and linguistic cues that a young person might give, meaning their approach to each person can be much more person-centric.

The Impact

Rob has noticed his team’s increased confidence in using their intuition in their work, giving them the ability to find what will achieve a positive outcome for each individual young person. 

“One of my favourite things about NLP is looking at the language that people use. For example, you' can have a one-to-one with someone, and you can listen to the words they're using. Quite often, people's limiting beliefs will come out, “I can't do that". Having the NLP training means that you can identify the language that a young person is using, “I can’t do that”. Then you can start to unpick what the limiting belief is that's holding them back from making the change, and work with them to overcome it.”

“What we want our service users and young people to have is the most skilled person in front of them, to give them the best quality service. You have to think proactively about your training program as an organisation, and about how you can take your workers to the next level. I think what the training fund represents is an opportunity for the whole industry to think about how we are training our workers, what we're training them in and what we want them to take out into the workforce.”

Rob has accessed the training fund for his team on more than one occasion, finding it to be a straight-forward and easy process. 

“I would highly recommend the Frontline Network’s Training Fund. It is difficult sometimes as a third sector organization to be able to find the funds to train your workers, and to respond to a need in your workforce, but the training fund lets you do that.”

If you have, or your team has, a training need that you are struggling to pay for

APPLY TO OUR TRAINING FUND

and we will do all that we can to help.

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