Supporting care-experienced children: 2. A trauma-informed approach

Tyrone Sinclair:
The school to prison pipeline through exclusions is very real.

Stuart Guest:
A trauma-responsive approach isn't just good for care-experienced children. It's good for all children. Because at any point, any child could come in and something has happened.

Stuart Guest:
So what I mean by trauma is understanding that a child's early life experiences can have a profound impact on how they view and see the world.

Rebecca Brooks:
If you have a traumatic experience as a child, but you have the buffering impact of a nurturing caregiver alongside you through that, then the negative impact is not as bad.

Matthew Blood:
It's really important that teachers actually understand that because what they will see in the presentation of a child is more dysregulation, more likely for children to be stressed, more likely for children to be anxious. And that will display out in the classroom in many different forms. So it could be that child becomes very withdrawn. That child became very angry, has difficulty with concentration and difficulty just generally around the school in developing positive and meaningful relationships with their peers and other adults in school.

Elliot:
My mum and my dad, they would shout at each other, argue. My mother might spend a bunch a time passed out because she took narcotics. The neglect with my mother grew worse and worse. My dad was already exhibiting quite dangerous behaviours. He'd have us stand at the wall if we did something wrong. He was quite a controlling person in a lot of ways.

Rebecca Brooks:
There are a lot of different kinds of trauma. When we're talking about children who've experienced traumatic early life experiences, we're usually talking about an event or a series of events that have overloaded the child's stress response system. Now developmentally, in the brain, children's brains are brimming with possibilities when they're born. But the connections need to be put in place and experience builds connections. So the kinds of experiences that children have, the opportunities that we give them, it fires connections in their brains. The more we make those connections, the stronger they become. So if a child is experiencing in general a calm, nurturing and loving environment, they are being given opportunities, they're being spoken to and exposed to language, if they are being given cuddles and hugs and plenty of physical activity, these are the connections that are becoming strong in their minds. If children are not exposed to that, if children are exposed to unpredictability, lack of food, fear about where the next meal is coming from, frightening noises, feelings of being unsafe, those are the connections that are developing strongly in their brains. And although our brains remain able to learn throughout our lives, so none of this is set in stone forever, it is more difficult for children who have been primed for danger and primed for loss and primed for fear to perhaps unlearn that and learn later what it actually means to live in a calm and safe and nurturing and secure environment.

Rachel Hiller:
They have learnt that the world is not safe for them and that people are not safe to be around. And part of our challenge as professionals then is to create that sense of safety and develop that sense of trust.

Tai:
So I just went completely withdrawn. I wouldn't be paying attention in class. I would fall so far behind on everything because I just would zone out for a lot of it. Basically I would just keep myself to myself. Teachers would see me in my withdrawn state. They would assume that I'm not listening, that I don't care about whatever's going on in the classroom. It was always like very negative. She's not paying attention. She doesn't want to be here. She's not doing the work. It was always just me being told off at the end of the class or having little notes in my book about not doing enough work.

Rebecca Brooks:
Trauma can manifest in a lot of different ways in different people. It's important to say that. So if you've met one adopted child, you've met one adopted child. Everybody responds to their circumstances in a different way. When we're speaking about children who've had the impact of early life neglect, abuse and trauma, it can play out in almost every domain of learning and development. So, for instance, a child who hasn't been spoken to, nobody read stories to them, nobody sang songs to them, they're likely to experience some delay in speech and language development. So it can lead to cognitive and developmental delays that teachers would recognise.

Bea Stevenson:
One of the key barriers to learning that a child who hasn't had those responsive relationships in their life might experience is interpreting social cues in ways that aren't helpful for them, so either as threats or kind of overly enthusiastically trying to connect with other people.

Rachel Hiller:
A group of kids at school, chatting, laughing with each other, they might be looking at that and thinking they're laughing about me. They don't like me and therefore it's setting off these threat cues for them that they're not in a safe situation.

Rebecca Brooks:
They're on the edge of a fight, flight or freeze response quite a lot of the time. Normally, you might run at, say, four out of ten for stress. A child that's primed to be on the alert for danger at all times might already be eight out of ten stressed when they walk into your classroom.

Molly:
When I'm stressed, I tend to shut down and I tend to go very quiet.

Elliot:
Half the classes I was in, especially around the beginning of senior school, I'd walk out crying because there was just so many emotions going on that I didn't know where they came from. I didn't know how to process them. Definitely a lot of the anger that I had would have made things difficult, would have made me hard to engage with. I didn't know how to deal with that anger, I didn't know where to put it.

Stuart Guest:
Stress is a real thing for children that are care-experienced in schools. That stress can manifest itself into thoughts but also physical reactions.

Rebecca Brooks:
What that can result in is, with very small triggers, meltdowns, unwanted behaviour, externalising of anxiety and fear.

Stuart Guest:
And it's really important for staff to be aware of those signs so they can intervene before it turns into something else.

Rachel Hiller:
We know that many care-experienced young people experience what we might call 'flashbacks' of their traumatic experiences. They might then really feel like they need to exit that situation. That when you're trying to manage a classroom can be really tricky because that might look like a kid running out without stopping and telling you, but to them, they're fundamentally trying to process something that is incredibly difficult and very threatening within their body.

Tyrone Sinclair:
If you start from the perspective that behaviour is communication, they could be showing you things, they could be telling you things without saying it. But sometimes they will come and give you a disclosure. So they will come and say, 'Look, can I talk to you about something?'

Elliot:
I was just hoping someone could listen and give me some direction on the dialogue that was starting to formulate in my head around all that stuff, but no one ever sat down with me and said 'I understand'.

Rebecca Brooks:
But it can also result in internalising of anxiety and fear. So you will also see children who are very quiet at school, barely speak, don't put their hand up for anything, would never tell the teacher they didn't understand the work, would never ask if they could go to the toilet, would never make themselves known in any way. And sometimes later on, we find these children are terribly behind. Or clearly haven't understood anything. And we say, 'Why didn't you ask the teacher?' and they can't answer that question. And so in terms of emotional regulation we need to be aware of these two extremes: children that are externalising all their feelings and children that are internalising all their feelings.

Molly:
What I do is when I feel things stressful, I almost push everything else away and try to go into my head into a little white room where there's nothing else but just me, where I can feel completely away from everything else.

Bea Stevenson:
It isn't a simple case of referring that child to CAMHS or somewhere else, somebody else's problem, but actually that school environment has a really important role to play in rebuilding that child or that young person's trust that they can be heard, that they can be understood and they can build really healthy relationships.

Matthew Blood:
There are three key aspects to a trauma-informed approach. The fundamentals and the real starting point is around a child's safety. And what we know from neuroscience and research, until a child feels safe, both emotionally and physically in school, they are not going to be able to learn effectively.

Tyrone Sinclair:
Balancing the tightrope between rules and expectations and then your duty to be sensitive as a teacher can be very tricky, but the more you practise it, the more that it becomes a skill.

Stuart Guest:
An example might be a child shouting out in the classroom. Whereas a typical school or a typical approach might be a zone board or a warning, something like that, a trauma-responsive approach would be going, 'OK. What is this shouting out telling me about this child now?' So what do they need?

Matthew Blood:
The second key approach of trauma-informed practice is around the development of emotional literacy. And what this means is that schools explicitly teach and guide children how to recognise and express their emotions. And that development of emotional literacy will in a sense enable that child to be able to regulate their emotions more effectively.

Rebecca Brooks:
It is absolutely essential that everybody in school has some understanding of what it means to have experienced trauma and loss. One of the reasons for that is because you cannot expect everybody in school to know the intimate backstory of every child that comes into the school. But if every member of staff has a reasonable understanding of the impact of disrupted attachments, of traumatic early life experiences, of moves through the care system, then it makes us as adults stop a moment and ask ourselves some questions before we act. 'What is happening here? What am I seeing in front of my eyes? Why is this child doing this? What has happened before this happened?'

Matthew Blood:
And then the third key aspect of a trauma-informed approach is around relationships and connectedness. Relationships are at the heart of trauma-informed practice, so that is about developing caring, empathetic, nurturing relationships with children.

Tai:
As soon as I went into foster care, I got put in touch with the pastoral lead. She took the time to actually listen and understand me, really listen to what was going on with me and she was someone who offered stability, which I'd never had before. The more she got to know me, then changed my outlook on school as a whole. This can be a safe haven.

Tyrone Sinclair: One of the most frustrating things that I can sometimes hear: 'Oh, I understand that this young person has problems, but…" Just taking out the 'but' can reframe the way that we're looking at this situation.

Bea Stevenson:
Teachers can be the trusted adult in a child's life. So actually building that relationship has to be the priority, and the number one, and everything else will follow from that.

Tyrone Sinclair:
If you want change to really happen, you have to be able to identify those problems and look at what interventions can be put in place to support them when those issues do arise. Because, ultimately, if not, you're just looking towards a culture of exclusion.

Rebecca Brooks:
When we think about our relationships, it encourages us to look at others as humans and so thinking of children as individuals with whom we can have a relationship, perhaps rather than statistical data. It can help us to begin to think about approaching our work with children in a more trauma-attachment focused way.