Looked after children & care leavers health team

03/08/2025

Children and Young People Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing Event

When❓Thursday 21st August 2025 11.00am-3.30pm
Where❓Hyde Town Hall.

See poster below for more details ⬇️

06/02/2025

Are you supporting a child with continence or toileting issues, as a parent, carer or professional?

Come along to the free workshop to find out more;

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/nhsgmtameside/1535004

04/12/2024

Cared for Christmas 2024 is now live🎅🏻

Please help to support us in any way you can to make this a magical Christmas for our cared for children and young people🎄

18/07/2024

Places where kids can eat free or for £1 during the Summer Holidays.

Thank you Money Saving Central

20/11/2023

Cared for Christmas 2023 is now live🎄

Please support us by kindly donating a gift for a cared for child🎅

https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/N4JBUB1O4FGX?ref_=wl_share

20/11/2023

24/05/2023

Trauma and the 🧠 brain ‼️

What is trauma❓

When we hear this word, we tend to think of severe neglect or abusive experiences and relationships. This is not necessarily true. 🤔
A traumatized brain can also be a tired, hungry, worried, rejected, or detached brain expressing feelings of isolation, worry, angst, and fear. 😧
In youth, anger is often the bodyguard for deep feelings of fear. 👮‍♀️
Trauma-filled experiences can be sudden or subtle, but the neurobiological changes from negative experiences cause our emotional brain to create a sensitized fear response‼️
When we feel distress, our brains and bodies prioritize survival, and we pay attention to the flood of emotional messages triggering the question, "Am I safe❓”
We react physiologically with an irritated limbic system that increases blood pressure, 📈heart rate, and respiration with an excessive secretion of the neuro hormones cortisol and adrenaline pumping through our bodies. ⚠️
Chronic activation of the fear response can damage other parts of the brain 🧠 responsible for cognition and learning.

What can we do to create calm and safe brain states within ourselves and within the students who walk in with an activated fear response❓

We first must understand that feelings are the language of the limbic system. 🧐
When a student in stress becomes angry or shut down, he or she won't hear our words. 😧
Talking a student through any discipline procedure or thought reflection sheet in the heat of the moment is fruitless‼️

🔴Here are three ways to calm the stress response -- two of them through immediate action, and the third by a brief science lesson.

🔴1. Movement

Movement is critical to learning while calming the stress and fear response. Teachers and students together could design a space, a labyrinth of sorts, where students can walk or move to relieve the irritation of the amygdale. Physical activities such as push-ups, jogging in place, jumping jacks, and yoga movements help to calm the limbic brain and bring the focus back to learning and reasoning.

🔴2. Focused Attention Practices

Focused attention practices teach students how to breathe deeply while focusing on a particular stimulus. When we take two or three minutes a few times each day or class period and teach students how to breathe deeply, we are priming the brain for increased attention and focus. These practices might also include a stimulus such as sound, visualization, or the taste of a food. The focused attention increases an oxygenated blood and glucose flow to the frontal lobes of the brain where emotional regulation, attention, and problem solving occur.

🔴3. Understanding the Brain

Teaching students about their amygdala and fear response is so empowering. When we understand that this biology is many thousands of years in the making, hardwired to protect us, our minds begin to relax through knowing that our reactions to negative experiences are natural and common.

We cannot always control the experiences in our lives, but we can shift how we respond, placing the science of our brains in the driver's seat of discipline‼️

20/02/2023

He's only gone and done it 👏 This is Barry Keoghan. At just five years old, he went into social care. He got moved around at least 13 different homes. When he was 12, he lost his mum to a he**in overdose. His dad was never around. At 16, he was kicked out of school. After learning acting from watching animals in nature documentaries he got his first role by answering an ad in a shop window. Tonight, aged 30, he's won the Best Supporting Actor Bafta for his performance in The Banshees of Inisherin 🏆 Take a bow, Mr Keoghan 👏

09/12/2022

🎁🎄🧑‍🎄Cared For Christmas Update 🎄🎁🧑‍🎄
Thank you so much everyone for your donations we have now reached 198 presents which is amazing!! We still need at least another 100 so if you can please help us reach our target we would be so grateful. Our children in care and care leavers often do t get much to open on Xmas day so it is so important we can reach as many as possible. Thank you for all your support xx
Please see below link