Written by Dr Jessica Cardy
Our work with families often involves supporting school staff to make sense of children’s difficulties within the context of the school environment. Parents often feel even more supported when, alongside our therapeutic work, we can attend school meetings with them and their social worker, or indeed attend meetings just with school staff.
Our role within these meetings is to think about their child specifically, bringing an understanding of developmental trauma and attachment difficulties, and what this can look like, how it can impact, and what teachers and school staff can do to support children with these needs within the classroom.
There is a plentiful supply of resources available to schools that can support both their understanding and ability to meet individual needs. We have recently collated and updated the resources available to our team on our intranet, developing a directory that signposts clinicians to appropriate resources relevant to primary and secondary education, as well as more general websites and resources, such as books.
We hope that these resources will support discussions that we have with school staff, equipping them with information to disseminate within their teams, promoting a trauma and attachment-informed understanding within their school. Resultantly, we hope that this increases understanding more globally within the school environment, enabling individual children’s needs to be consistently understood and responded to.
