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, whether or not their school partners with us.

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 link with your school’s name on it. 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 take your word for anything on this page.

There is no separate school version of the library. Your families read what every reader reads. What a partnership changes is who pays, how they reach it, and what your pastoral team can do with it.

What your community gets

• The whole library, for every family in the school.From the day it opens. No individual sign-up, no per-family billing, nothing for a parent to buy.
• Access through what you already run.Your parent portal, or your existing parent mailing. We do not ask you to procure another platform or to send your parents somewhere new to make an account.
• 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, carrying your school’s name, in about thirty seconds.
• Parent evenings led by the therapists who write it.Shaped with your senior pastoral team around what your parent body is actually navigating 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.
• Co-branding, on your terms.Your name alongside ours, and a foreword from a member of your staff if you would like one. We will not brand over you.

What it asks of you

Close to nothing, and we have designed it that way on purpose, because the reason most wellbeing initiatives fail in a school is that they quietly 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.

No training day. No platform to administer. Nothing 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 quietly drift from what a school would want its parents to be told.

What it costs

An individual parent subscription is £129 a year, cancellable any month. A school partnership is priced per community rather than per family, and we would rather work it out with you against the size of your parent body and what you want alongside the library than publish a number that fits nobody. It is intended to be defensible as a line item next to what a single external speaker costs for one evening.

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.