Mental Health Natters

06/11/2024

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When the pressures of our lives and caring for others exceeds our capacity to cope over a long period, then it gets harder to get back to a happy place. We might feel anxious or agitated, it might be hard to sleep, we might withdraw from others or have overwhelming fatigue. We might be quick to anger and constantly irritable, and find it hard to calm down.

But the pathways back to feeling safe are hardwired into us, our nervous system inherently knows the way back – we just have to listen and tune in. The more we listen, the easier it becomes to find out way back.

That is what Dr Abigail Fisher's webinar next Friday (15th Nov) is about – calming your nervous system - tuning in and listening to our bodies. With a bit of theory to help you understand your nervous system, and lots of practical exercises which you can take away and apply in your life, this webinar is about taking a little time for yourself, and finding some calm in the midst of the craziness.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/looking-after-yourself-calming-your-nervous-system-tickets-1074327655939?aff=oddtdtcreator

30/10/2024

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I was talking to a grandmother last week about schooling. ‘I can see the difference’ she said. ‘When my children were young, primary school was relaxed. If the weather was good, they went outside and ran around. If they were sick, they stayed at home. Now with my grandchildren they are seated in desks for more of the day and if they are ill, they are worried that they’ll lose their 100% attendance for the term. The pressure is on to pass their phonics test when they are six and then to learn their times tables at speed by the time they are nine. They feel it and and their parents feel it too’.

There’s lots of talk about SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) at the moment, and how increasing numbers of children are being identified as SEND. It’s less common to ask questions about what SEND really means, and whether the education system creates more children ‘with SEND’ as it becomes more pressured and rigid.

For what SEND really means is that a child cannot learn in the way which mainstream education expects. They cannot keep up with expectations, either for academic work or for behaviour. SEND is something which happens in the interaction between a child and the education system. In a system where no 6-year-old is expected to sit still and learn to write their name, then a 6-year-old who just wants to run around outside isn't a problem. In a system where everyone is meant to be able to read by age 6, then they are.

We know from research that if a child is young in their year, they are more likely to be identified as ‘having SEND’. We know that summer born boys are far more likely to be identified as ‘having SEND’ than autumn born girls. We know that the impact of this immaturity resonates through the years, with the youngest in the year doing less well at GCSE. We know that the number of children ‘with SEND’ is going up year on year.

It's not really plausible that more children each year have difficulties in learning, nor that being born in August makes you more likely to have learning problems than if you are born a few weeks later in September.

It’s far more likely that in the push to ‘drive up standards’ the education system is becomes less, not more, suited to how children develop and learn. It’s more likely that the system is penalising immaturity – and children are inherently immature. That isn’t a lack or a defect, it’s a defining part of childhood.

As the education system becomes more rigid and pressured, we’d expect more children not to be able to manage without adaptations. This is exactly what we see. Those children are holding up the flag for all the others, saying that this system is not child-friendly and doesn’t take account of developmental needs and differences.

What if, instead of having higher expectations of the children, we had higher expectations of the education system? What if those expectations were of flexibility, reducing pressure and prioritising lifelong learning and wellbeing instead of short-term testing?

What if we saw the increasing number of children ‘with SEND’ as a sign that the system isn’t working for the many ways in which children develop, rather than a sign that more and more children have learning difficulties? We’ll never sort the ‘SEND crisis’ until we start looking at SEND as an interaction between children and the education system. The more rigid the system is, the more children it will fail.

Illustration by Missing The Mark from the book A Different Way to Learn.

20/10/2024

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12/10/2024

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🌿 Free Monthly Wednesday Webinar Announcement! 🌿

We are delighted to announce our next webinar for October!!

Neurodiversity Affirming Practice with Andy Smith
📅 Date: Wednesday, 16th October 2024
⏰ Time:8:00 PM - 9:30 PM GMT

To register go to
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpf-2pqz0qHNRQeooqyNqZ3YTq0660rVOl #/registration

Or go to link in bio or DM if you would like the link to register!!
If you can’t attend live, register anyway to receive the recording after!

Andy wants to make sure this session is as helpful as possible, so he’s asking:
💭 What topics or questions would you like him to cover?
Share your thoughts via the survey link https://forms.gle/XLdYv4XzcjatsrTE9

To find out more about Andy’s work please visit https://www.spectrumgaming.net

Let’s spread the word—like, share, and join us! 🙌

12/10/2024

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Several parents have told me that they’ve seen a psychologist who has advised against removing their child from school, saying that this will only increase their anxiety. I’ve seen this advice in books for professionals – books on ‘school refusal’ will claim that allowing a child to stop attending school and seeking another way to learn will cause all sorts of anxiety issues to get worse.

As a past ‘school refuser’ myself, I have a different perspective. I really disliked school at two times in my life. Both times, I was not scared of school. I hated it. I hated the way it made me feel, the way the other students behaved towards me and the way that it felt like I was wasting my time. I only became anxious because I was being made to attend school.

It’s true that avoiding things that make you anxious will sometimes make a person more anxious about that thing. Avoiding dogs will not resolve a dog phobia and might make things worse. Graded exposure can be a really useful tool in reducing anxiety which has got out of control.

School attendance problems are not the same as a dog phobia.

There’s an important distinction between anxiety which is irrational (like a dog phobia which means the child is terrified of all dogs, even a sausage dog), and feeling anxious about being made to do something that you really dislike. In the first case, the problem is fear which is out of proportion to the dog. In the second case, the problem is that you really dislike something and you are being made to do it.

With the dog phobia, it makes sense to say ‘stop avoiding dogs’. The child will learn that dogs aren’t as scary as they think, and their anxiety will reduce.

If we treat school in the same way, then it has the potential to make the problem worse. Because if you force someone to go into a school where they are deeply unhappy repeatedly, then they may well get more, not less, anxious about it. Unhappiness and dislike of school does not respond well to exposure therapy. The child may become hopeless and rather than learning that school isn’t as bad as they think, they may learn that no one is listening.

I meet children like this. Those who have been forced into school because someone said that it would make things worse if alternatives were explored. Sometimes they get on a downwards spiral and stop doing anything. They shut themselves in their bedrooms.

In order to help these children, we have to think differently about education. We have to stop assuming that the treatment for school anxiety is more school. We have to ask ourselves whether our education system is a place where every child can thrive, and if not, we should ask ourselves what we could do better.

24/08/2024

🩵 amazing and easy to read book 🩵

Planning on taking a different approach to education this year with your neurodivergent child?

I've just heard that my book A Different Way to Learn is 20% off in the Jessica Kingsley Publishers collection with code: SCH24.

You'll need to order directly from JKP from their website to get the discount.

Please share if you know parents who might benefit.

23/08/2024

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From

23/08/2024

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What a strange thing we do to our young people in this culture and time.

We make them spend several years learning things that they often have no interest in, that they have not chosen and that they will in many cases never use again. We tell them that these things are vitally important.

Then we sit them in rows and make them write about the things they can remember for an intense few hours. We compare what they have written down with everyone else of the same age, and then we rank them.

We make them wait a couple of months and then we tell some that they are the successes, and others that they are the failures. We encourage them to hang their self-worth on how they performed. Newspapers publish pictures of the delighted, whilst the disappointed hide their heads in shame.

We tell them that these results will determine the rest of their lives – and then we set up systems that make this true. We provide fewer opportunities for those who did not succeed. Those who did well can take their pick of courses, whilst those who did not are made to take the same tests again and again, just to hammer it home.

We make sure that young people spend the majority of their adolescence focused on exams and under pressure. Every summer, they sit in rows and try to remember. Each year, they’re told that their whole future rests on this.

Many of them inevitably cave in under the pressure. They become anxious and depressed. They show signs of burnout by the age of 16. They lose their spark, and just go through the motions. Some of them retreat altogether.

Then we pathologise them, say that they need mental health treatment or to become more resilient. We send them for therapy or give them medication. We say that they are the problem, whilst the system carries on unchanged.

What if instead we stopped to think about what we are doing to our young people?

Adolescence is a time of opportunity and vulnerability. It’s a one-off stage of life. What if we asked ourselves, should our young people really spend these years on a conveyor belt of high stakes exams?

Imagine we allowed ourselves to look beyond this time and place, and to see just how strange this really is. What would we do then?

19/06/2024

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Glimmers, the opposite of triggers! These are just some examples of the kind of moments that can give us feelings of calm and safety. Finding our own glimmers can really support our wellbeing 💜

19/06/2024

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Mandy reflects on her experience of getting a diagnosis and finding support for her autistic son, and shares where she's found help along the way.

19/06/2024

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Another account hits the news of a school implementing extremely controlling behavioural policies, in the name of turning the school around.

All these pieces report similar approaches - immediate detentions escalating quickly to isolation for minor infractions, including uniform and equipment issues. Staff encouraged to be rigidly consistent, and penalised if they aren't.

The results are predictable. Kids start to dislike school, parents start to protest, and undercover teachers say it's a toxic environment, but they don't dare say so in public. And then people in power say that the parents and kids are making it up and it's only one side of the story.

If they are making it up, it's odd that so many of them say the same thing.

Why are we hearing about so many schools punishing kids for missing green pens, or the wrong colour socks? It's down to the Broken Window theory.

Sweat the small stuff and you won’t have to worry about the big stuff.

This is based on broken window policing. The idea is that if you leave the broken window in a neighbourhood people will think that it’s uncared for and not monitored, and more disorder will follow. The neighbourhood will go downhill. Mend the windows, and you can stop that from happening.

It wasn’t meant to be about people. It was about the environment (and even then, the research isn’t strong). Because it turns out that when you apply it to people it has some quite troubling consequences. Lots of ‘stop and search’. Racial profiling, and deteriorating relationships between people and the police. It turns out people don’t like being jumped on for every little thing. It doesn’t make them feel more positive or pro-social.

Windows and people are, after all, quite different.

In some British schools however, the idea that the way to turn a school around is to 'sweat the small stuff’ has turned into an obsession with uniform details, missing equipment and everyone doing things the same. Line ups in the morning and inspections at tutor group. Refusing to allow girls to wear socks over their tights, as Longsands school did last winter. Everyone using rulers to track reading, and having to keep books flat in the desk, as is reported happening in Astrea Academy schools. Sending girls home en masse for skirt length, as a Welsh school did last week.

Petty control, in the name of ‘sweating the small stuff’. It makes it hard for parents to complain, because schools will say it’s part of their overall strategy to turn behaviour around. Yes, no socks over tights might seem trivial, but they are the ‘broken windows’. Let them wear non-regulation socks and next thing you know they'll be dealing drugs at the school gate.

The result? Schools are seeing broken windows where before there was just a pane of glass. They’re finding windows which weren’t actually broken, but are just designed differently to other windows, or perhaps were left slightly open. Behaviours which were not an issue before have become worthy of sanction.

They’re looking so hard for broken windows that they are seeing them everywhere.

The result is to turn (almost) all the kids into perpetrators. Even the ‘well behaved’ kids get multiple behaviour marks and instant detentions. Those who push back end up in isolation very quickly. I spoke to one girl who said that in her large comprehensive school, only eight children made it through the whole year with no behaviour marks. Less than 1%. She knows because there was a special assembly about it.

Young people and their parents say it creates a negative environment, where kids feel that they are only noticed when they do something wrong - and it’s easy to get things wrong. Some teachers say the same. Staff are leaving and some of them are speaking out. They are scared too, just like the kids.

Some kids get into a spiral of being constantly pulled up for minor infractions and pushing back. Because that is what some kids do. They push back. They want to be able to make some choices in their lives, and they resist petty control. They say No.

For them, sweating the small stuff has exactly the opposite effect that is intended. The small stuff gets bigger and bigger. Cracked windows appear in places where there weren’t even windows before. Broken glass is everywhere you look. The kids fall apart - and still the same strategy continues.

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/cult-like-liverpool-schools-kids-29358458

03/06/2024

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Punishments Day
A parent of a Year 7 child who is struggling with attendance has got in touch. Their school (in a deprived area) has sent a letter about the Year 7 Rewards Day, to be held in the last week of term. It is a fun activity day to be held at school, run by an external company. It is the sort of thing most of the children will not have had the opportunity to do before.

To attend, children must have above 90% attendance, not too many behaviour points and their parents must pay a significant amount of money. Payment won’t secure a place, because if the child’s behaviour or attendance isn’t good enough, they’ll be excluded regardless.

If they can’t participate in the Rewards Day, they must attend school anyway in school uniform and do a normal school day. Her child is at 80% so isn’t invited. This is a punishment. Being excluded from a Rewards day will be experienced by those children as a punishment.

Here’s why policies like this are counter-productive and unfair.

These policies reward the lucky. They reward those who find school easier, who don’t suffer from chronic illness or anxiety and whose families can find extra money. They reward those who are more able to control their behaviour (something which is highly variable at age 11). They reward those who have had a better year.

These policies shame the vulnerable. They make it highly visible to everyone who are the year’s ‘Successes’ and ‘Failures’ in the eyes of the school. They end children’s first year at secondary school by reminding them all that some of them have had a much harder time than others – and that those people are not worthy of celebration. It could lead to increased bullying and ostracization.

These policies are a double punishment. Behaviour points are already punished by detention or isolation. There is already a system in place for attendance. To collate those points and attendance rates and then punish the children again means that the slate is never clear.

For those who are struggling this is a way of ending a difficult year on an even more difficult note. They will conclude that their school thinks the problem is them. It is very unlikely to lead to improved behaviour and attendance in Year 8, because it doesn’t address any of the reasons why school is hard for them – and it will make them feel bad about themselves and negative about school.

What’s the alternative? If you’re going to do something fun at the end of term, do it for everyone. Show them that they are all part of the school community and that they are all worthy. End the year on a positive note for all, regardless of attendance and behaviour points.

You never know, that might make a difference – and it will be the most vulnerable who most need to know.

Illustration by Eliza Fricker Missing The Mark.