Let's Move On From Here...

I was talking to some of my students the other day about their experience of anxiety and how it feels. What, I asked them, is it like to suffer from anxiety? They described their anxiety in various ways - the rising panic, waves of nausea, the black fog... What they all said though is that it is always there. Imagine that. Imagine if that feeling that you have when faced with, say, an Ofsted inspection was your normal state of mind. Imagine if there was no let up from that colly-wobbly slightly sick feeling. That's what global anxiety disorder is like. It's exhausting to be anxious, and the more tired you are the harder it is to manage. The trouble with global anxiety is that it is not about just one thing. It's like a big tangled mess and the sufferer doesn't know where to start unpicking it.  It's one thing to be anxious about something that you can compartmentalise and quite another to just be anxious about everything. Some days everything is wrong. Ever...

I was in a CPD session recently where we were discussing how best to help students who come to us with huge gaps in their knowledge. Any student can have a small gap - a missing piece of the puzzle which makes moving forward with their learning difficult. The standard approach in most schools is to give the student some extra support in a time limited one to one intervention (say half a term). But for some students their gaps are huge "grand canyon" chasms which seem impossible to fix - especially when they come to us in Year 9 or later which they frequently do. A typical referral to an alternative provision will have missed a lot of school either through ill health, truancy, exclusion or a combination of factors; some will have missed months - even years. Frequently these learners have gaps that go right back to the basics - most critically in their literacy and numeracy. Learners who are missing key concepts and knowledge then find it very difficult to access many parts o...

I have just heard on the news that a child who claimed to have been abducted and raped has in fact made up at least part of the story. The abduction, it seems, did not happen. I do not know this child, nor do I know anything about her but I was heartened to hear her described as "vulnerable" and that "county council and social services are working with the victim at her pace" (BBC News website). It would be tempting to see this child as simply 'attention seeking', but my experience with children who 'make things up' tells me that there is far more than that to this story. Ask yourself this: why would a child lie about being abducted and raped? It is not the sort of thing that a happy child who feels safe and successful does. It is not the sort of thing a happy child even thinks about. It is the sort of thing that a child in crisis does because they desperately need something that they are not getting. I have met children who say things th...

I have been thinking a lot about behaviour recently - hardly surprising given the environment I have chosen to work in. In my new post in January I will be working with young people who have been excluded from school or who are in danger of exclusion. I have thought for a long time that it is really unhelpful when teachers talk about children being "naughty" or "badly behaved". We are describing unwanted behaviours and habits and then, usually, agreeing with each other that the child is disrupting lessons or affecting the learning of others. We commiserate with each other and reinforce the idea that there are just some children who we would be glad to see the back of. It feels helpful to have these conversations in - at least you know that it's not "just me" and that others have the same problem. Slapping the "naughty" label on the child means it is not your fault - your behaviour management is not in question. They are a naughty chil...