Page 42 - SEN116 January-February 2022

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they get home and if there are any worries. Sometimes children may not feel safe expressing this in the school environment but may tell their siblings or parents through words or actions. Make sure to build in plenty of opportunities for positive and responsive communication between school and families. Some ways in which to develop this include:
• Effective communication with parents/carers. This could be in the form of a home/school record book or pictures of what the child is doing at school/home.
• Recognise that children may prefer home than school, perhaps because of previous experiences of schooling, more manageable sensory demands or feelings of safety fostered by family.
• Sometimes the regular and natural ‘touch-points’ of mainstream school are missed within the context of specialist provision as children may come from further away. Build in opportunities for teachers to be able to speak directly to parents, often this may happen at the school gate but as a SENCO think about how this could be developed despite the use of external transport providers.
“If teachers are finding things hard then it can have a knock-on effect on a child’s emotional well-being”
Teachers
Along with friends and family, teachers were also cited by children and young people completing the survey as supporting a return to school. Teachers can be fundamental in building a culture in which children feel safe, valued and nurtured. There were comments made around having open communication with their teachers about their thoughts and feelings, with one child saying ‘being able to talk to the teachers’ helped their return to school whilst another simply said ‘my amazing teacher’. There was also the acknowledgement of reciprocity, if teachers are finding things hard then it can have a knock-on effect on a child’s emotional wellbeing with one commenting ‘Teachers being stressed make students stressed’. Some offered very practical ideas which are detailed below:
• The use of technology to bring the ‘strange space’ of the school to the child in their home. For example, making
a video that a child and their family can look at which helps familiarise themselves with the schooling space.
• Providing structured experiences to share and model empathy, acknowledging how difficult it may be in attending school. This is especially important as it may have been previously that children’s experiences have been dismissed as unimportant or insignificant to other processes relating to school and their Special Educational Need.
• The use of scripting to acknowledge the above, for example, ‘this seems to be making you feel sad, is there anything I can do to make things feel any easier’?. Make sure that you allow the child/young person to correct you and the identification of the emotion they are feeling (e.g. “No, I am angry....”)
Ultimately, the suggestions the children offer themselves to support their mental health when returning to school are just that, helpful additions based on approaches and development of relationships through communication and fostering of opportunities. What we need to ensure is that children feel like they belong to a wider community irrespective of their individual circumstances.
The British Education Research Association (BERA, 2018) ethical guidelines were used as the principle framework for ethical guidance. All participants recruited were informed of the aim of the research and recruited via request from their school, local authority or parent.
■ Engaging with children in the classroom.
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