The Scottish Government

« Previous | Contents | Next »

Listen

Executive summary

Chapter 1 Introduction

This study was commissioned in April 2004 by the Pupil Support and Inclusion Division of the Scottish Executive Education Department. The work was undertaken by a group of researchers in the Rowan Group at the University of Aberdeen over a period of approximately 11 months.

Better Behaviour Better Learning ( SEED 2001) provides a context for the establishment of the study:

2.13 Whether a child 'acts out' (demonstrates bad behaviour openly) or 'acts in' (is withdrawn), they may have barriers to learning which require to be addressed. Children 'acting out' may be aggressive, threatening, disruptive and demanding of attention - they can also prevent other children learning. Children 'acting in' may have emotional difficulties which can result in unresponsive or even self-damaging behaviour. They can appear to be depressed, withdrawn, passive or unmotivated; and their apparent irrational refusal to respond and co-operate may cause frustration for teachers and other children.

Beyond the association of mental health problems with indiscipline there are other reasons for considering children's and young people's mental well-being. According to Weare (2004a) there has been a paradigmatic shift in thinking about mental health in recent years from a 'deficit to a strength perspective'. The emphasis is now on providing 'mental health promotion for all, family-centred care, early identification and intervention, moving care to natural settings such as schools, and interdisciplinary approaches based on evidence of effectiveness and permeated by a philosophy of continuous quality improvement.' (Weist 2003).

For schools to take on this role of promotion of mental health requires a change in the way schools understand and respond to issues surrounding 'mental health'. However, Weare (2004a) argues that concepts of 'mental health' are not well understood in school, having belonged until recently within a medical discourse. Moreover, she suggests that 'schools often find it hard to see the relevance of mental health to their central concern with learning.' This may in part be related to the unfamiliarity of the language and the tendency for the term 'mental health' to be conflated with 'mental illness' since schools are more familiar with the language of social and personal development and the importance of self-esteem in learning - both important components of mental health and well-being.

Putting schools at the centre of the drive for promotion of mental health among children and young people forms part of the Health Promoting Schools Project of the European Region of the World Health Organisation. The health promoting school's framework is used here to structure the format of this report, by focusing on the three essential elements to a school's operation: ethos and environment; curriculum; partnerships.

This chapter also sketches the policy enactments that support this new approach in both health and social care fields as well as in education.

The research aims which drove the project were to:

1) Review existing literature exploring the link between mental and emotional wellbeing and behaviour in schools

2) Identify (from literature review or empirical work) any particular circumstances or experiences associated with, or leading to, mental and emotional health problems, that can manifest as behaviour problems in schools

3) Examine the role of education authorities and their partners (other statutory and voluntary agencies) in developing structures, policies or resources which enable staff to identify links between mental and emotional problems and behaviour and develop appropriate responses

4) Examine whether any links between mental and emotional wellbeing and behaviour are mis-assessed or under-addressed in schools

5) Conduct research to identify how schools perceive links between behaviour and mental and emotional health difficulties

6) Identify what schools perceive as successful responses to behaviour they believe to be caused by mental and emotional health problems

7) Conduct research to identify how parents and children perceive links between behaviour and mental and emotional health difficulties

8) Identify what parents and children perceive as successful responses to behaviour they believe to be caused by mental and emotional health problems.

Three principal research methods were used in this study: literature review to establish what pre-existing work had to say about the issues highlighted above; telephone surveys undertaken as a scoping exercise with key informants in local authorities, health boards and voluntary agencies with an interest in work on mental wellbeing; and six intensive case studies of a number of interventions aiming to tackle issues of mental wellbeing and discipline.

The case studies selected were:

• ASSIST (Aberdeenshire Staged Intervention Supporting Teaching) - an initiative to support classroom teachers dealing with low-level disruption

• The Place2Be - a UK charity providing therapeutic and emotional support to children in primary schools

• Newbattle Integrated Community School Team -This had developed from the New Community School pilot initiated in 1997 and was based in an area of Mid-Lothian which included areas of poverty and social exclusion. An integrated team headed up by a manager and including a range of professionals was based near a large secondary and worked closely in the school and feeder primaries.
• East Renfewshire Multi-disciplinary Support Team - a well established Integrated Community School team which included a youth counsellor and a social worker, and demonstrated a commitment to individual and community well being

• Clydebank High School Support Services Team -an extended team in which pastoral care, learning support and behaviour support staff had been amalgamated, together with a group of pupil and family support workers
• The North Glasgow Youth Stress Centre - a voluntary organisation working directly on mental and emotional wellbeing and behaviour with young people in three secondary schools and community settings.

Chapter 2 Promoting mental health and emotional well-being through school ethos and environment

This chapter focuses on the effects of the school's culture and environment in determining or transforming attitudes to emotional wellbeing and discipline. This encompasses issues such as relations with parents and carers, relations between teachers and pupils, and the tensions between delivering education in the mass and responding to the needs of individual children.

From the literature review an analysis is derived of how school environments might themselves create or exacerbate problems of wellbeing and indiscipline, together with a look at how the school environment might be theoretically engineered to produce better results. In part B the empirical evidence is used to explore how well Scottish schools appear to be responding to issues of ethos and environment, at least in the eyes of the stakeholders, teachers, parents and children who were interviewed.

In answer to the question, 'How might the environment of the school itself create problems of mental wellbeing and indiscipline?' the literature review reveals a number of important answers. Schools that are poorly embedded in their communities and in which individual teachers have little understanding of the sorts of daily problems being experienced by pupils and their families create a poor basis for establishing a health promoting school. Poor levels of understanding in turn affect the ability of the school to communicate with the parent group. Low levels of interaction between parents and school do not support rapid identification and remediation of problems.

The literature also tells us a lot about how attempts have been made to engineer school ethos to produce better results in terms of wellbeing and discipline. These can range from overarching frameworks like the establishment of tiered response frameworks for classroom incidents of indiscipline, clear models of support for both teachers and pupils, and the importation of additional posts with different professional expertise to more specific schemes hoping to promote peer mediation, pupil participation and so on.

Within the school, the nature of relations between teachers and pupils will become a critical factor in the way in which problems of wellbeing related to discipline are construed. Who is to blame when children misbehave? If the answer is always that the problem is conceptualised as one where the child has deliberately chosen to flout rules or be non-compliant, then discipline structures will be invoked. A recognition that external stressors or aspects of the school's operation itself may have contributed to, or exacerbated an incident may be used to invoke a more supportive response. Where pastoral and discipline systems are not highly convergent this can lead to huge variability in the treatment of similar incidents, depending on factors like teacher knowledge of pupil and family circumstances, as well as the levels of pressure prevailing in the situation in which an incident occurs.

Schools must have a capacity to identify both general points of vulnerability for individuals or cohorts (like transition between primary and secondary), but also the specific vulnerabilities of groups like looked-after children. Any school in which bullying or racism is tolerated or even implicitly condoned cannot hope to avoid creating its own discipline problems.

The empirical evidence presented here supports the broader findings in the literature review. Knowledge of the catchment and the sorts of social problems that might be encompassed within it was seen as crucial, with commentators making a contrast between urban and rural areas, the latter benefiting from small school sizes and more stable community structures. Links were made from this directly to the ability of parents to be participative in aspects of education. Some commentators felt that the perceptions of schools (and authority structures generally) by some of the most disadvantaged parents meant that some form of mediating service like link workers was very beneficial, giving parents less daunting routes through which to make contact with schools or address school issues in respect of their children's behaviour.

Within schools the same issues of teacher relations with pupils emerged as paramount, but respondents from all quarters acknowledged the very real tensions between meeting the needs of the most vulnerable within a mainstream system largely geared towards the academic requirements of the majority. With schools focusing strongly on attainment, the need to flex the system to make time and space for individual children who were troubled or troubling often proved difficult. Whilst acknowledging that it was not essentially incompatible for a school to aim for academic excellence whilst also operating a strong pastoral system, even critics acknowledged how little 'wriggle room' schools had in the way of teaching resources to take on both roles.

Buying in or attracting additional resource to access support from professionals specifically skilled up to deal with these sorts of issues provided one solution, but only worked at very simple levels if outside help was simply used to mop up problems schools felt too harassed or unskilled to deal with themselves. We return in chapter 4 to these issues of 'ownership' of the problem.

The ethos of the school was also critical in determining casual day-to-day relations between young people and adults. Informal rather than programmed interactions often gave young people an opportunity or window to raise issues which they would not have brought forward in more formal settings. Extra curricular clubs, school trips and outings often allowed teachers to see children in a different way and observe problems that they would not have noticed otherwise. In many instances non-professional support staff in schools can become the first port of call for distressed children, and schools need to be clear about both the value of approachable adults, but also the ways in which they need to be supported to seek out further help for children if necessary.

Finally, there are relatively few examples where young people (or their parents) have much autonomy in terms of seeking help or accessing service. Sometimes protocols of referral are daunting in themselves. Experimental schemes which allow pupils and their parents to self refer have, where managed properly, proved their worth.

In a variety of complex ways school environments are thus a critical element in the development of a school which promotes mental wellbeing and helps deliver some solutions to discipline problems.

Chapter 3 Promoting mental health and emotional well-being through the inclusive curriculum

The curriculum is characterised here as consisting of both process features (related to pedagogy or ways of teaching and learning) and products (specific curricula designed to 'transmit' skills or knowledge).

With regard to process, primary schools may be more prepared to accept the necessity for looking at the ways in which embedded pedagogical approaches can build competences and encourage active learning and good mental health. Teaching approaches like circle time are widely used in a primary setting, but there is also evidence for the effectiveness of very targeted schemes for the most vulnerable, such as nurture groups. Secondary schools are often resistant to reviewing the pedagogical process and even the advent of new community schools has not appeared to shift the entrenched position of many, where a transmission metaphor underpins the dominant mode of teaching and learning.

Curriculum products designed to produce better mental health tend to be invested in the Personal and Social Development silo of secondary teaching. Here, marginalised by its status as a non-examinable subject and not always commanding the loyalty of those drafted into teaching in this area, they often fail to impress. Properly managed and effectively run, they can be seen to achieve more, but it is notable that young people, when asked, seem to value most those curricular offerings in this area that emphasise young people's own role in setting the agenda and which encourage active learning and a more holistic approach.

In relation to the transmission of explicit knowledge and skills about mental health, opinion divides around whether the appropriate focus is prevention (of ill-health) or promotion (of mental wellbeing). Experts also disagree about the virtues of universal versus targeted programmes. The former are non-stigmatising, inclusive and so on, but the 'dosage' is so low and so diffuse that it is relatively impossible to show 'effect' in research terms. Targeted programmes find it easier, if well engineered, to demonstrate gains for troubled young people, but at the cost of labelling and segmenting the youth cohort.

Some curriculum designers have attempted to produce materials that will combine process and product, thus focusing strongly not just on what is taught but how it is taught. The MindMatters programme is examined as a specific example of this approach. Early evaluation of the effectiveness of this programme is encouraging, but inevitably, the devil is in the detail. The level of commitment with which the programme is implemented clearly impacts on the level of success achieved. There is no simple 'magic bullet' set of curriculum materials that will improve mental wellbeing for all or even a few without the school having some real commitment to the task.

Empirical evidence is limited in this chapter to what emerged from the scoping surveys and from documentation provided by various agencies. None of the case studies explored curricular interventions. In practice little was heard of universalist curriculum interventions focused on changing ways of teaching and learning. There was however, a considerable array of interventions targeted at specific and vulnerable groups which sought to use different ways of teaching and learning. We speculate that smaller numbers make this possible, but also that the profound difficulties evident in some groups of children clearly demand a different approach of themselves. If traditional pedagogy is failing to engage young people then something else must be tried. In the cases cited in the report drama, storytelling and other forms of active learning were used to engage children and work actively towards the promotion of their mental health. Some of these were designed to explore with children how they might accept their inappropriate behaviour and 'normalise' it.

For the most part curriculum endeavours are focused on product, and most are carried within the school PSD curriculum. External agencies play a large part in delivering more innovative messages and materials on some of the difficult topics related to mental health issues, and interventions were offered both on and off school sites.

Chapter 4 Promoting mental health and emotional well-being through partnership

This chapter has looked at the models of partnership that schools have adopted as part of the response to new policy pressures to deliver more inclusive education and stronger integration with other welfare services.

The review of the literature alerts us to the terminological quagmire surrounding the descriptions of a variety of approaches to multi-disciplinary working in practice. Some inexactitude is probably permissible and even advisable, however, in light of the fact that in most cases agencies are feeling their way towards workable relationships at strategic and practice levels, rather than being required to work to a template.

Literature also alerts us to the tensions of inter-professional working with children - different conceptualizations of the child and his/her competence, different patterns of relationships between child and adult, different protocols for sharing information and maintaining confidentiality. In addition there will always be a tension between what is appropriate pride in having learned to do a skilled and professional job, and an inappropriate and stubborn defence of single ways of working and specific styles of expertise against competing frames of reference from other professional groups.

In this chapter we have used a very simple typology to describe forms of partnership working at practice level as a way of structuring our thinking and the presentation of results:

• Export problems off-site by referring troubled or poorly behaved children off for expert services delivered elsewhere or into containment schemes
• Import skills into schools to solve problems of mental wellbeing/indiscipline, but devolve authority to another agency or professional group
• Retain ownership of 'problem' in school, importing skills and personnel, but using these in integrated service teams to develop new approaches that are embedded in school life.

In practice there is considerable overlap between these categories. In addition, the tendency to see the categories as transitional (with a gradual move towards greater ownership of mental health/discipline issues by schools) may be misleading. Essentially, however, the typology is useful in forcing consideration of the extent to which schools are prepared to locate mental wellbeing/discipline issues in the school environment as well as in the child and his/her family background and to put in place structures which support young people, remediate problems and which operate preventatively. In reviewing the empirical findings from this study we have therefore continued to use this rough typology.

It was interestingly rare to find 'export' models of dealing with mental wellbeing/discipline issues in our data. At strategic level both education and health authority spokespeople noted the need to patrol the actions of schools in referring problems onwards and outwards, and this may still be the first recourse for a school not prepared to review and revise its ways of operating and still resistant to inclusion agendas. At practice level in the case study settings, schools were much more inventive and determined to see what they could do to solve the problems they encountered themselves, whilst acknowledging that for some young people there would always be a need for expert services provided off-site.

Some forms of provision we looked at fell somewhere between a simple export model and that of importing skills, in that teams of skilled professionals from health, social care, youth work and so on had been established to work in tandem with the school population but off-site, on the basis that the school environment itself imposed too many agendas about the use of space, the types of relationships, the assumptions of outcomes etc that would be appropriate within the intervention. Both the North Glasgow Youth Stress Centre case study and that of the drop-in elements of the Newbattle intervention display some of these characteristics.

The modal form of working in partnership within our empirical study was clearly that of importing a mix of skills to address some newly defined and recognised problems. This might involve 'buying in' a complete service, as in The Place2Be example, or establishing a multi-agency team working in parallel with school guidance staff as in the East Renfrewshire example. Such models potentially offered the opportunity to build capacity amongst school staff as well as directly providing new services for young people. In practice, however, some such interventions could be relatively impermeable. They were on-site, but still represented an 'export' model, with little potential for exchange of learning between teachers and other professionals. Even where multi-agency teams operated more openly within schools, their main point of contact was with guidance, discipline or learning support staff, and many class teachers remained at a distance from the interventions. However, this may simply represent the stage to which integrated multi-agency teams have developed thus far, and clearly does not preclude a more gradual drawing in of a wider group of staff nor the intervention having a more profound effect on the life of the school than it might have hitherto. In the interim - if that is indeed where we are - such imported skill mixes are bringing additional resources to bear and allowing schools to offer a varied and innovative range of interventions that they clearly would not be able to provide otherwise.

Our final category looked at the case where schools eschew imported help and look to find solutions to wellbeing/discipline problems within the school community itself. Only one of our case studies exemplified a form of this, with Clydebank using an integrated team within the school to address many of the problematic issues it faced, although the ASSIST intervention which was also one of our case studies represents a strategic level intervention to support and mentor teachers with respect to classroom discipline issues. The virtues of such an approach are clearly that it represents a statement of ownership of the issue and a commitment to resolving it by reviewing the school and the way it operates in its entirety, rather than looking for quick fixes to solve problems or provide services. The noted resistance of teachers to learn from others, when those others are usually dealing with cases on an individual basis rather than in the group settings which confront teachers might best be countered by learning which takes place within the community of practice.

However, in both the cases cited above, there was no compulsion to participate or be part of the intervention, and the divide between those who wished to buy into the scheme and those who didn't was as marked as in the schools where other professional groups had been brought on site.

Chapter 5 Concluding points

In this final chapter we pick out for comment some of the starker points that arise from the findings from both literature review and empirical work. Generally we have refrained from making recommendations based on these observations

Strategic implementation

• Scoping studies showed huge variation across the country in terms of implementation of new policy imperatives at both strategic and practice levels
• Responsibility for issues related to mental health in schools is spread across different sectors and shared between many disparate posts within sectors. This makes postholders less likely to come together to share information between authorities and also complicates arrangements for joint working with health and social care agencies
• Unfamiliarity or reluctance to engage with the language of mental well being results in a failure to explicitly address the issue in some cases
• How this is interpreted really depends on a political viewpoint as much as anything else. Does it represent a form of chaos which allows some authorities and schools to pay lip service to current rhetoric whilst making only imperceptible progress towards changing fundamental ways of working? Or does it represent an enviable ability of the Scottish government to allow 'local strokes for different folks'?
• We simply observe that what currently exists at both regional and local levels is a form of random experimentation which is not being evaluated in any way that would allow us to decide what is best practice or what is effective. However, we recognise the importance of local mental health and behaviour support groups and networks as a beginning to this process.

• A national shortage of educational psychologists and CAMHS workers (most acute in areas of greatest deprivation) is putting pressure on schools to develop improved internal mechanisms for supporting pupils, and is altering the relationship with these agencies to one of consultation and partnership, rather than export. In some cases the shortage of specialist staff has given rise to increased capacity of staff as more creative approaches are adopted within schools. However, there remains a tension between the view that "experts" can and should provide magic solutions for troubled children, and the more holistic approach based on whole school responsibility for the welfare of each child.

• Experiments in joint working or service delivery are often initiated using short-term funding streams. This exacerbates the fragmented and chaotic feel of the field and raises major issues about sustainability.

What works?

• It is a natural desire on the part of policy makers to want to know which measures are 'effective', and the pressure for education to develop more evidence based or evidence informed practice exacerbates this trend. However, it is a question which is next to impossible to answer in respect of the issues with which this project deals
• Few interventions in this field are designed to be evaluated. The random collection of 'data' which we observed in many settings is misleading and unhelpful. The complexity of school communities makes it very difficult to establish causal relationships (for example between implementation of intervention and improvement in attendance figures)
• The self evaluations undertaken by commercial organisations funded to deliver service look workmanlike but need to be regarded with a degree of scepticism
• Engagement with practitioner research or action research was limited, yet this could provide a fruitful means of evaluating small-scale local interventions, with minimal disruption to vulnerable participants.
• Complex social interventions are difficult to evaluate without complex (and costly) external evaluation, and their findings are very often overtaken by policy priorities and undermined by political timetables
• However, we cannot demand that the research tail wag the practice and policy dog. There is no point in advocating simpler interventions because they give clearer research outcomes when it is complex interventions that are clearly required

• Evidence points to the synergy that develops when problems are tackled in multiple ways and through a variety of strategies

'Ownership'

• 'Ownership' of mental health/discipline problems came up as an important underlying theme, but after consideration of a three layered model of export, import and ownership, it is clear that this invokes false dichotomies and an unhelpful sense of schools needing to move towards some gold standard model of good practice
• If we remove 'ownership' from its protective punctuation, we can say that for us, it implies:
• a sense of the school and the individuals that work within it accepting professional responsibility for children's mental wellbeing as part of a general welfare responsibility
• accepting that some discipline problems may be associated with children experiencing poor levels of mental wellbeing, and not just being bad or naughty
• acknowledging that there may be ways in which schools themselves contribute to poor levels of mental wellbeing in young people
• undertaking to review all aspects of the school's ethos and functioning in an attempt to minimise negative impact and improve the positive and supportive things that schools can do.
• This model of ownership chimes with the staged intervention approach introduced by a number of education authorities, whereby schools are encouraged to support low level mental health difficulties themselves, consulting other professionals for support. Import of skilled personnel to work with children and young people is reserved for higher level difficulties, with export of pupils to other facilities is limited the most severe and intractable difficulties, requiring highly specialised, intensive interventions
• It seems clear that no one model of organising a school has a monopoly of virtue in this regard
• Shipping the problems off-site and washing one's hands metaphorically of them is clearly a sign that a school has not accepted ownership of the issue, but - that said - there are occasions when off-site solutions may be attractive and appropriate
• Managing the problem within the school and trying to deal with it only within the standard professional group did not always seem a healthy way of demonstrating ownership. Ownership does not imply sole responsibility for children's troubles, and it seems irresponsible and unhelpful not to attempt close levels of co-operation with parents and with other supportive professionals
• Issues of vocabulary and language impede ownership of this issue in the case of individual teachers. The language of mental health is not one to which teachers readily subscribe, both because it implies a different professional expertise, but also because mental health is often couched in a medicalised way which locates problems in the child rather than examining the socially constructed aspects of mental wellbeing and indiscipline problems
• Successful implementation of the ownership model has considerable implications for the training and support of school staff to develop new approaches to pedagogy, ethos and behaviour management which address the mental health needs of all the children in their charge.

The school environment; external and internal ethos

• A sense of the school and its relation to its catchment seems a critical element where the welfare of children is at the heart of the enterprise. This is an 'upstream' level of intervention if wanting to improve discipline and promote mental well-being, but its importance is fundamental
• Despite the advent of the integrated community school, the community element of the project is often one of the most underdeveloped aspects, particularly in secondary schools. Some important exceptions to this (as in our East Renfrewshire case study) need to be examined to develop good practice guidelines
• Some of the best examples looked at in the case studies were indeed offering integrated service packages, but the tendency is for these to operate to professional-led agendas, rather than to be community responsive

• Schools continue to face real difficulties in building bridges to communities and particularly to the parents of the most vulnerable children. We are still at the very early stages of understanding how to involve children and parents more meaningfully, or how professionals can interact with each other to deliver support to families and communities
• The use of workers, who are employed outside the traditional professional roles, such as pupil and parent support workers, or family learning co-ordinators, seems to be one of the more successful ventures in being able to provide very disempowered parents with more legitimate voices and routes of access into the school system
• Despite the constraints referred to in this report it is clear that some teachers were skilled at creating good relationships with young people, although externally based professionals and pupil support workers based in schools were generally described as more likely to embody the qualities and to have the remit to foster these and to support young people to develop their own supportive social networks. Fewer opportunities exist within schools for teachers to develop supportive relationships with individual pupils

• In important respects educationalists continue to operate in a very different way from other professional groups, discussing children's cases and deciding their 'treatment' without feeling under any obligation to allow the presence or the voice of child or parent. It is quite difficult to see the justification for professional practices like these which are so out of kilter with best practice in health and social care. These practices often take place at the joint support team meetings which are a multi-agency forum, so within the educational setting the other professionals collude with this
• Ethos issues also operate in respect of the nature and the level of interactions between individuals studying and working in schools. The importance of the teacher-pupil relationship is paramount in promoting well-being. Recent policy changes which place the responsibility for children's happiness and safety in school on tutor group teachers, offering continuity throughout their secondary school career and linking pastoral care with PSD, should begin to address this issue ( SEED 2005a)
• Children and young people want to be recognised and responded to as individuals but there is a tension between this and the structure of schools, particularly secondary schools, in which pupils are organised in terms of classes and subjects and everyone is subordinate to the needs of the timetable

• In addition, teachers frequently see their role in terms of the need to 'control' and this creates a tension between the desire to understand a pupil's problems and the need to punish unacceptable behaviour - a tension which may also be present in the pastoral system of guidance and behaviour support
• The emphasis on control means that the problems that come to the attention of the school tend to be those which disrupt learning. Withdrawn behaviours may be overlooked when they do not interfere with teaching.

Ambitious, excellent schools?

• Are attainment agendas and the pursuit of academic curricula incompatible with schools having a strong welfare role? Opinion was divided on this question in the field
• In theory, as some of our respondents pointed out, these are two sides of the same coin. We know that happy well-adjusted pupils learn better, so the pursuit of good mental health need not necessarily be at the expense of good academic outcomes. Similarly, firm but supportive discipline and guidance regimes create the right environment in which children can prosper

• In practice, however, the constraints of the curriculum as it is now largely established in schools, and the regimes of inspection, audit and accounting of school effectiveness make the troubled or non-compliant child a very awkward fit in a system of mass education
• Many commentators spoke of a desire for more flexibility to meet the needs of individuals or groups of children. A 'one size fits all' model is at odds with the need to shift education into a new paradigm where service follows need, rather than the other way around. It was widely held that, such a radical challenge to traditional notions of education would take considerable time to be truly embedded in practice
• There was little evidence of authorities or schools able or prepared to undertake the radical review of curriculum or pedagogic method that might be required to deliver the truly health promoting school
• There is also little evidence of reluctant teachers or head teachers being challenged and called to account for the mental well being of pupils in their charge
• In the interim we have a lot of peripheral changes - usually with respect to the PSD curriculum. Here the involvement of other professional groups seems to offer real benefit, particularly in young people's eyes, but the whole process needs to be carefully managed to deliver most benefit.

Professional partnership

• Inclusion is about schools adapting to meet the needs of a wide range of diverse learners. The change in terminology from 'special educational needs' to 'additional support needs' is intended to accompany a shift in the meaning of participation from a notion of 'readiness to be integrated' to one of 'right to be included'. For this to succeed requires a concomitant shift in attitudes
• Many more pupils are now included in mainstream schools who would formerly not have been there. But this increases expectations of classroom teachers to be able to respond appropriately to diversity and need - including the needs of challenging pupils - and this requires adequate staff development in order to build the capacity of schools.
• Building teachers' morale and confidence has clear knock-on benefits for children's welfare
• The drawing into schools of other professional groups offers the chance both for building capacity on this issue within the teaching group and, of course, providing for young people additional and different services from those which teachers can offer
• An overview would indicate that we have the latter but not the former in most instances. Additionality has been achieved, but it may take time to build capacity in this way

• Some resistance was noted on the part of some teachers to believe that other workers could contribute to their own professional development. Issues of status, professional respect and understanding were widely in evidence, and were exacerbated by geographical and temporal segregation of the different groups
• However it may be important to ensure that interventions are given time to become embedded and evaluated using appropriate methodologies with the target populations as young people move towards adulthood

• At present parallel working is the norm rather than true integration, and there is an argument for saying that more intervention is actually required now in and around schools to lever proper integration before parallel working becomes the new norm and equally difficult to shake
• The development of trust and confidence in one another's competence, the establishment of shared protocols, the drawing in of a wider circle of involved teachers will all take time and must be given time to develop. The political commitment to produce services that follow service users' need rather than professional convenience is a paradigm shift that will take some time to bed down in education
• Attention needs to be paid to the ways in which teachers learn. Mere exposure to the skills of other who interact with children in a very different way will not of itself develop capacity
• Systems of teacher-to-teacher mentoring and support look promising as ways forward, but not all teachers feel able to engage with such scheme
• A management lead in terms of championing the issue and establishing expectations about the role of the competent teacher are necessary prerequisites for engaging staff across the school. Successful joint working is also enhanced by an integrated approach to service management as observed in established ICSs, where a single high profile enthusiast can facilitate firm relationships between professional groups.

« Previous | Contents | Next »