How do school leaders protect and promote well being of pupils and staff when it is evident that some children have come through and continue to live with serious adversity and trauma? Challenging and behaviour and disruptions to teaching and learning threaten the well-being and safety of children, teachers and SNAs.  

This course will help school leaders and learning support co-ordinators to understand how adverse childhood experiences and trauma impact on learning, behaviour and relationships at school.  

Many successful and evidence based behaviour management strategies just do not work with some children.  Looking at behaviour as communication and understanding it with a ‘trauma informed lens’ can help both the child and the adult working with them to learn and to develop and positive nurturing relationship. 

Understanding our own responses to stress and challenging behaviour helps us to regulate and to plan and support staff to become ‘trauma informed’ and compassionate and to develop nurturing relationships throughout the school.  Trauma informed strategies and planning are core to protecting the most vulnerable pupils from negative sanctions while cultivating a school that is safe for all pupils, staff and parents. 

This course is aimed at school leaders and SEN co-ordinators who are working to develop whole school trauma informed and attachment aware practice and policy. 

Anne McCluskey is a former primary school principal with long experience in educational disadvantage.  She has been delivering training to teachers in this area since 2016. She has a particular interest in attachment theory and learning and in the educational experience and outcomes of children in state care. 

Dr Mary Gordon is an educational and child psychologist who worked in NEPS for 27 years with primary and post-primary schools and with Youthreach centres.  She has a particular interest in child development, social and emotional learning and the neuroscience underpinning behaviour, emotion  and social interaction.  

 

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