For one ten year-old boy it’s another school day. As usual he’s walked in with his mum but when gets to school door he just can’t go through it. He does everything he can to prevent it, punching the wall, digging his heels in, clearly distressed but not running away or hurting anyone else. No-one knows what to do for the best and every time […]
“There’s only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve; the fear of failure” Paulo Coelho de Souza What protects a child from fear of failure? It’s being able to see the way ahead with realistic optimism, building the sense of security that comes from meeting challenges on the way and overcoming them, knowing that they’ll happen and knowing they’ll be temporary. What […]
I watched the Panorama programme ‘Mental health: Young lives in crisis’ last night. It struck me on one hand as a message of hope over experience, on the other as a story of people reaching out in desperation as they struggle to stay afloat, treading water with a mass of others in the same condition. The rate of probable mental health conditions among 6 to […]
What part do school’s play in strengthening children and young people’s mental health? From “Swamped – NHS mental health services turning away children say doctors” “The shocking state of CAMHS care is laid bare in a survey for the youth mental health charity stem4 of 1,001 GPs across the UK who have sought urgent help for under-18s who are struggling mentally. CAMHS teams, already unable […]
How can we get children to behave properly in school, to take their work seriously and stop messing about? The answer offered by the DfE is to do more of what’s done already. Focus on the bad behaviour you can see, put aside thinking about what might underly it, and apply graded punishment it until it stops. Knowing what children find unpleasant the pain can […]
Recently a number of threads have been drawing together, connecting children’s behaviour and their mental health and wellbeing, school attendance, exclusion and the various approaches to supporting and managing these vital factors in children’s lives. One thread is the new DfE drive to “improve the consistency of school attendance support and management”, proposing teams of attendance advisors, and an ‘attendance alliance’ of education leaders, setting […]
A while ago I met twenty children from years 7 to 11 in a high school, for 1:1 Solutions Focused Coaching sessions. They’d been put forward as children finding life in school most difficult and beyond the reach of the established routines of reward and punishment behaviour management. The group included; A 12 year old who spoke in a whisper, who struggled to think of […]
Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University, Boston author of ‘Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain’ says this (see Guardian March 1st 2022 ‘The big idea: is it time to stop talking about ‘nature versus nurture ?’): “Few scientists today would say that 100% of your attributes are inborn or are learned; the debate tends to be about where to draw […]
My article last week ‘It’s time to scrap exclusion from schools attracted a few replies on Twitter, among them: * This is interesting. Reasoned sensible argument about exclusions. Thank you Geoff.The need for change. * And prison of course. Let us not safeguard children. * I’d be all for a system that doesn’t include exclusion. But I’ve yet to hear a practical proposal that achieves […]
It’s time to scrap school exclusion. Why? Because Plan A isn’t working. A story – Plan B. A young man on the edge of adulthood, experiencing such severe panic attacks it’s causing him to disengage and putting his educational future at risk. As part of a school team developing Solutions Focused Coaching as a new pastoral approach, I’m asked to work with him. His […]
