Standing in the Gap is an Early Intervention child mental health charity working with preschool and primary aged children and their parents before they hit crisis.

Our Mission is to support children and families by providing tools to build emotional wellbeing and good child mental health

Our vision is for every child to be emotionally healthy and able to flourish

We are a local charity with a global footprint. Based in Bloxham, Oxfordshire we offer evidence based facilitated online workshops for children and families to help them to understand and manage big emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger and grief and key transitions such as starting or changing school.

We want to make Child mental health resources and tools readily available for families. Do meet our elves:

The current picture of child mental health in the UK, from up to date research:

We stand in the large gap between the underfunded NHS services and children and parents.

We bridge the gap in child mental health support with a programme of facilitated talks, workshops, online resources and bespoke support.

We work in empowering partnerships with parents and schools to achieve emotional wellbeing in preschool and primary aged children.

If you are able to donate to help support us in this vital work please do

We are quite unique as a charity in that we work with parents AND children together. We believe that both are important together for good child mental health.

We have two cartoon elves who help us explain child mental health concepts to children and parents.

Our Mental Elf, who is purple, helps us understand our feelings and emotions: what they are and how we can manage them.

Our Physical elf, who is green, helps us understand our bodies physical and biochemical responses and how these impact our feelings and emotions.

We all have physical and mental health (elf), so together they help us understand this.

Our elves pop up in our workbooks, resources, interventions, videos and even on Christmas trees! Do keep an eye open and see if you can spot them.

What support do we offer?

We offer Support for concerns in the form of monthly online workshops for children and parents. Click on the images below for more information and how to join us at the next workshop

Support for difficult times: losing a loved one is never easy at any age whether this is a grandparents, relative, friend or family pet knowing what to do, what can help and how to support your child can be hard.

This resource contains a series of videos supporting you through this time along with a beautiful illustrated book: The Teddy with the Hole in its heart

We also provide Preventative support around educational transitions. We know that children undertake key transitions in education such as starting primary school and moving to secondary school as a right of passage. All children go through these transitions but if they don’t go well it can significantly impact their mental health and educational attainment.

To enable as many children as possible to have positive transitions we run a series of talks: Click on the images below for more information.

This talk is aimed at parents whose children are starting primary school in September

This talk is aimed at parents and Year 6 students who are moving to a new secondary school.

All our workshops and talks are supported by resource packs to enable families to practically use the interventions we recommend. For more information visit our online shop

Giving additional support, sometimes children and parents need enhanced support, which we provide through The Lifeboat Centre (TLC) programme which uses the same principle as a lifeboat. We come alongside and support you when you are struggling and there is a problem. We work with you to get you back to firm ground by providing one to one bespoke support. We work with both the parent AND the child together. For more information click on the picture below: