VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
students enough to help them and teach them instead of controlling and punishing them.
Can you measure the difference? It is still early days. We record every incident because of the nature of our students and we are beginning to see a difference. Comparing behavioural incidents in January 2016 and January 2017, we have seen: • A 90% decrease in reported high-risk behaviours
• A 68% decrease in medium risk behaviours • A 51% increase in low risk behaviours That's just the numbers. Each of those 'behaviours' is a child with a story who has begun to find other ways of dealing with his or her feelings.
What is the outlook for your learners? Our students study a broad and varied curriculum with practical, 'hands on' subjects as well as an enrichment programme designed to enhance social and empathy skills.
confident talking about mental health difficulties such as self-harm and suicide. By the end of the course we were all better able to recognise early signs of mental health problems.
Our caretaker Maurice Pearson is testament to the success of the course. He said: 'My job is to look after the building and when they wrote swear words or put graffiti on it, it really annoyed me. After going Mental Health First Aid course and learning about what some of these children have gone through and their depression and anxiety I see it more from their perspective. I find I am not quite so bothered about the graffiti because I understand more why they do these things.'
We want all staff to do the two-day Youth Mental Health First Aid course, regardless of their role or seniority. Many of our young people identify with Maurice and are more likely to open up to him than to a female teacher or a designated member of pastoral staff. Equally, it was important that senior management, including me, should do the training because we needed consistency of approach.
How did staff react?
Some of the old staff left, despite being offered training in new approaches. There was an attitude of ‘You’re letting them get away with it. We have been there, tried it and it doesn't work.' After reflecting on practice and where the school had reached on its journey, I realised we would need to restructure the staff team. We needed people who could go beyond a babysitting service, people who could develop those higher support approaches, so we started to employ postgraduates who were open to different ideas and willing to work on very solution focused strategies and approaches. We now take pains to get staff who will understand and implement our approach. We have a clinical psychologist, assistant psychologist and a drama therapist.
Ironically, I have hardly any teachers who have an actual qualification in working in SEMH. Obviously, we look at developing our staff all the time and the vast majority have completed a Mental Health First Aid course, and some are going to complete an attachment and trauma awareness course, but in terms of a heavy duty
February 2018
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SEMH qualification, none of us has that. What we do have is the experience of being at the chalk face every day plus a little empathy!
Where do you stand on exclusions? We try our utmost to avoid exclusions and each time we try to analyse what we could have done differently. Exclusions don't work for our young people. What kind of a message do we put out when we tell students off for poor attendance and then when they behave in ways that are unacceptable we exclude them, cutting them off from teaching and learning, social contact, sources of emotional and psychological support and even their entitlement to free school dinners? I would say the introduction of 'reflective and restorative practice' has had a real impact. Here we take the time to examine what happened, the approaches we tried, decide what’s working well and agree how to move forward. It’s about listening to each other and respecting each person’s viewpoint. We practise this as a whole school, working with the students rather than trying to do things to them. We need to value our
It is exceptionally important to get the curriculum right. It needs to enthuse students as well as being sympathetic to their social and emotional needs. It's not just a case of covering as many academic subjects as possible or paying lip service to resilience and Spiritual, Moral, Social and cultural aspects of learning. It needs to be individualised and carefully crafted and is still very much a work in progress.
Our role is to help, not judge. Our students don’t want sympathy. They don’t need to be 'fixed', but we do hope that when they leave they will have a set of results that reflect their ability and that they will be able to maintain relationships with others, to hold down a job and look after a household. We owe it to them to make sure they have these skills.
REFERENCES
Young People's Academy -
http://www.ypacademy.org.uk/
The Skills Hub -
www.theskillshub.org Innovating Minds -
www.innovatingmindscic.com/
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