In this weeks Beyond The Badge, we caught up with Matthew Humphries and Tayla Russell to learn more about the Criminal Justice Mental Health team and the Secondary Care Individual Placement and Support (IPS) Sandwell Team.
Later in March 2025 the duo will be doing a charity abseil in support of the National Literacy Trust – a charity close to Matthew’s heart.
Tell us about your teams:
Tayla: We are a specialist criminal justice mental health team providing mental health support and intervention to individuals who have had recent contact or ongoing contact with the Criminal Justice System, whether this be court, prison, police, custody.
We provide sole intervention and help individuals to engage with generic services as sometimes these individuals can be institutionalised or have had a long history of offending and trauma which can be a hard cycle to break alone. We work alongside police and probation services to support individuals with mental health difficulties.
Matt: Our remit is to support patients, and clients, on their journey to find paid, competitive employment in the general job market whilst they’re under the care of secondary services.
Our only criteria is that the individual wishes to work and is accessing the Criminal Justice Mental Health Team or Secondary Care Mental Health Teams.
When we start working with someone, each individual is allocated a vocational specialist, which is my role, and we go through the 360-employment journey with each person. We start by creating a CV, then we’ll have conversations about what they want to do, what experience they have, what their dream job is, what they might be able to do. I like to throw in left field things that people may not have thought of that matches their skills.
We tend to meet clients once a week, sometimes more, and we’ll create a CV, job search, engage with employers, and support individuals in creating supporting statements. We also help with mock interviews and interview support. We also provide a lot of guidance on disclosing personal health information and criminal convictions as well.
Another part of our role is to remove barriers to employment. This could be something like not being able to access public transport, so we might provide bus vouchers to help them get to their interview. We’ll also show people how to use Google Maps. Sometimes we might come across someone whose literacy skills aren’t great so we might try and guide them towards doing a functional skills or English course to improve their employability. All those barriers you can think of to employment to someone who may have been out of work for quite a while, we try to reduce or remove completely.
Then once an individual is in employment, our team doesn’t just disappear. We also provide work support to help them on the next part of the journey back into the world of work. So, for example, if there are any issues with the employer or issues getting to work or issues with colleagues, we can help support them with that too. Our aim is to help people reach 3-month and 6-month sustainable employment.
As well as working with individuals to help them secure employment, our team also does a lot of employer engagement too. This involves talking to employers in the local community that may have vacancies where we might be able to place people. We also help individuals access the hidden job market. A lot of jobs aren’t advertised online, but they’re out there. So, we try to find opportunities like that. For example, a few weeks ago, we spoke to a local dairy company who offered trial opportunities to individuals we work with. These roles weren’t advertised but by connecting with them we were able to share these opportunities with the people we work with.
What is the most enjoyable part of your role?
Tayla: Helping people to heal from difficult experiences that they have encountered through no fault of their own. Watching someone heal can have a significant impact on their thinking, decision making and motivation towards building a happy and safe future aware from criminal activity and negative influences.
Matt: My favourite part of the role is meeting people and hearing their different life. I really enjoy hearing about their hopes and aspirations for the future. And obviously, it’s really lovely when someone that we’ve worked with lands a job. It ends up being a celebration for our whole team. We celebrate each other’s success. And, we’re pretty successful at helping people land jobs, so we have a lot to celebrate as a team!
What are you most proud of?
Tayla: I am most proud of the intervention I provide to my service users; especially trauma based intervention as it really seems to make a different. I have several service users who I have recently discharged after completing treatment and feel very proud to say after holding these cases for around 1 year; I have done everything I can to help these individuals to become experts in their own recovery.
Matt: The team accepts referrals from the Criminal Justice Mental Health team and Secondary Care Mental Health teams I have an individual on my case who has been in contact with the criminal justice system.He’s got lots of experience in roofing and things like that but no actual formal employment history. So we’re helping him put things in place to support his CV and application.
It's the journey sometimes rather than the actual outcome. It’s about seeing people come to you in one state of mind and seeing the light bulbs going off in their brains and they’re seeing, if I do that, it’s going to really help my CV or land a role. That kind of change of thinking. I was there, but I don’t have to stay there.
What would you most like your colleagues across the Trust to understand about your team?
Tayla: That we don’t work like most primary and secondary care services; we are able to keep service users open to ourselves whilst they engage with other mainstream services; providing a link in communication and additional support with engagement. We often find that service users are discharged from other services because they are open to us, what we would like to see is much more joint working allowing us to support services to support service users.
We do not provide a set list of structured intervention; although we do provide interventions, sometimes we just hold service users short term to help with decision making and problem solving to get them through a particularly hard time in their lives.
I believe we are a very flexible team in terms of support and consider all avenues possible.
Matt: I would say to colleagues in the wider trust, if you have a conversation with a patient, or a client, and they mention employment, explore it a little bit with them and see if it’s an off the cuff remark or whether they really want work. If they do, just give us a call and chat to us. We can talk you through the referral process. It’s just a short referral form. It’s not a big form and you can compete it in just a few minutes.
We’re also doing some drop ins at Quayside and Hallam Street in April 2025 where we’ll be talking about the wider recovery and employment team and the services we offer. We have around nine services that have all have different eligibility criteria and offer slightly difference aspects in recovery and employment.
Just talk to us. We don’t bite! You can also check out the Employment and Recovery team pages over on the Intranet to find out more about what we do.
We understand you’re doing some fundraising for the National Literacy Trust. Can you tell us more about what you’re doing and why NLT is an important cause to you personally?
Matt: We’re doing an abseil down a viaduct in the Peak District on the 16 March 2025. It’s about 80ft! I’ve done abseils before, but never that high! So me and Tayla Russell from the Criminal Justice Mental Health team are doing that. It’s in aid of a charity called National Literacy Trust. The charity aims to improve literacy levels across the country for the most disadvantaged communities, schools, hospitals, prisons – they do a lot of good work.
Tayla: My reason is to support my friend and colleague Matt as I understand this is a charity close to his heart. I also think they do a fantastic role and would be a service for us to link in with when meeting service users with poor literacy skills, which can be common across the CJS.
Matt: The National Literacy Trust actually helped changed the trajectory of my life. I wasn’t always a working professional and I’d had some counselling for addiction problem. I started back full time education when I came in contact with the Literacy Trust through a short story I wrote about football, about watching Walsall Football Club. It was published in a book about Walsall Football Club which was published by Legends publishing in London.
For a long time whilst I was studying, the National Literacy Trust was a big part of my life. I ended up speaking at conferences about my own reengagement with education and literacy and the importance of good literacy. I even featured in their impact report back in 2008 and was part of a promotional film. Everyone was asking me if I was going to be on the BBC!
I was also invited to the House of Commons to watch the promotional film. There were MPs and industry leaders, and lots of Premier League Football players there! There’s a project called Premier League Reading Stars which is a 10-week literacy intervention designed to be delivered in schools, libraries and football clubs. The aim is to stimulate literacy engagement in children aged 9-13 years who love football but lack motivation in reading. Each football club in the Premier League has a player that promotes literacy to reach hard to reach groups such as young men. The idea being that they see Premier League Football player, who they look up to, reading and they’re then inspired to read too.
In the second year of my degree, I did a six-week internship with the National Literacy Trust and had some interviews with them after I graduated. I also created a long distance writing course during COVID-19 for long-term offenders in HMP YOY Feltham for the Literacy Trust. I’ve also done how to create workshops for primary school children in Leeds. It’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. I had to present my work to a group of challenging Year 6’s.
Without the National Literacy Trust, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. I wouldn’t have had the skills for professional jobs and they’re still very close my heart. I’m still in contact with some of the staff there and sometimes I use their website for resources if I’m working with someone who is struggling with literacy. It’s a really good organisation.
Sponsor Matthew and Tayla:
If you’d like to sponsor Matthew or Tayla, donations are being collected over on JustGiving where you can also get updates on their abseil:
Matthew’s page: https://www.justgiving.com/page/matthew-humphries-737?utm_medium=FA&utm_source=OF
Tayla’s page:
https://www.justgiving.com/page/taylajaynexx?msockid=397e3bb17e7067d700cd2e197f576676
How your donations help:
£7 could give a child the chance to go to a fun event in their community to discover the magic of books and nursery rhymes.
£10 could enable three families from disadvantaged communities to attend motivational reading events, inspiring them to read for pleasure and giving them the tools to support their children’s literacy skills at home.
£15 enables us to give books to children in deprived areas of the UK, where 1 in 8 children don’t have a book of their own.
£20 could give a child access to inspiring activity booklets and school programmes that will help them develop the literacy skills they need to thrive at school.
£30 could provide a child with their first 5 books, setting the foundations with a love for stories and supporting their early literacy development.