You don't have to figure out school anxiety on your own.

If your child is struggling with school and you're not quite sure what to do anymore, I just wanted to say you don't have to do this on your own.

I've been popping up in quite a few Facebook groups recently, sharing ideas about school anxiety, so I thought it might be helpful to introduce myself.

My name's Nicky Odgers and I'm an independent educational psychologist based in Cambridge. So a couple of years ago I was working as a senior EP for a local authority and I became really interested in how we support children who are worried about school.

I was seeing a lot of young people as part of EHC needs assessments but by that point, things had gone really badly wrong and it often felt like opportunities had been missed. If we'd just been able to step in earlier we might have been able to prevent things from escalating in the way that they had. And at the same time, I was also seeing young people who weren't managing to get into school at all, and who seemed to be very stuck sometimes not even leaving the house, and often there wasn't really a clear way forward.

And one of the most important things that stood out for me was how little support there was for parents in these situations. So families were dealing with something incredibly difficult, but they just didn't have access to clear, practical guidance to help them understand what was going on or what might help and many felt judged or blamed or very isolated, and it really wasn't their fault.

When I became an independent educational psychologist, I wanted to see if I could do things differently. So I set up School Anxiety Support to try and make support more accessible so parents could get help earlier, rather than having to wait until things had reached crisis point.

So now I share a weekly video blog, all about school anxiety, looking at what might be going on and what can help.

And there are also a number of free resources you can download. For example, quite a lot of you have downloaded the School Anxiety Checklist, which helps you think through what might be behind your child's worries. And more recently, I've created a simple plan for difficult school mornings with some practical ideas for making mornings feel a little bit calmer.

Next week I'll be sharing details of a free webinar for parents who want a little bit more support . So keep an eye out if you think it would be helpful.

And I just wanted to say again, you really don't have to figure this all out on your own.