Supporting the Emotional Well-being of Children and Young People with Learning Disabilities

A Whole School Approach

Mark Fox, Tom Laverty, Sanchita Chowdhury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000703016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Supporting the Emotional Well-being of Children and Young People with Learning Disabilities is an essential and practical resource for helping children with severe and complex learning difficulties, their classmates, their teachers and the schools that they attend. The highly adaptable materials, activities and ideas presented in this book will be useful both in the classroom and in staff training to promote understanding of emotional well-being and mental health of all pupils who may need support.

Fox, Laverty and Chowdhury cover a range of topics that engage with the school as a whole, inclusive classrooms and the individual student. Their frameworks and practical suggestions aid teachers to support the well-being and mental health of students in a variety of ways, with material tailored for classrooms and the individual student.

Supporting the Emotional Well-being of Children and Young People with Learning Disabilities is a comprehensive resource for teachers and management in special needs schools, recognising current government policies and helping teachers to understand and appropriately engage with students as individuals and as classes.

Section 1
Initial engagement

1.1 The background to Emotionally Able

This book is about supporting the emotional well-being of children with severe and complex learning difficulties. “Emotionally Able” is the name that we give to the collected information in this book and this includes background information and activities that you can use to either work with your class team or, if you are the Emotional Well-being (EWB) coordinator, you can introduce to the whole school. The first section provides material for a school to become initially engaged with emotional well-being – and in particular why a whole school approach is helpful as well as the importance of working as a team. This section also focusses on the difficulties of understanding the emotional well-being and mental health needs of children with severe and complex learning disabilities.

Describing a child, or young person, as having “learning difficulties” or as being “learning disabled” has a broad range of meanings. In education the term “learning difficulties” is used to cover a wide range of pupils – from those that may have specific difficulties in learning to read to those who have a lifelong disability that affects their ability to live independently. Emotionally Able focusses on those children (and young people) whose learning difficulties are sufficiently severe or complex that they will require access to specialist provision, often in special schools. They will have life-long difficulties with cognitive learning which may also be affected by physical (e.g. cerebral palsy), sensory (e.g. visually impaired) and medical difficulties (e.g. epilepsy), and those with a diagnosed condition such as an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The UK Health system uses the term “learning disabled” to refer to largely the same group of children (and specifically those with IQs under 70). The World Health Organization (2014) uses the term “mental retardation”. In this book we describe these children as those with severe and complex learning difficulties.

In the UK these children will usually have an Education, Health and Care plan (EHC plan) which identifies their needs and specifies the provision required to meet those needs. Emotionally Able is aimed at all children with learning difficulties – not just those where social, emotional and mental health needs (SEMH) have been identified in their EHC plan.

Much of the thinking around children with severe and complex learning difficulties is around the best ways to teach them and how to manage their behaviour. What is less frequently talked about is their emotional life. In recent years the government’s thinking has changed so that the importance of the role of mainstream schools in supporting the emotional well-being of all children is now recognised. However, there is often still reluctance, or uncertainty, about the best ways to support the emotional well-being of children with severe and complex learning difficulties which is often only viewed as the absence of outbursts of challenging behaviour.

School staff working with children with severe and complex difficulties are often faced with a dual challenge. Not only do the children have difficulties in learning and development some may also have significant SEMH needs. These emotional elements can be deeply ingrained, difficult to change and result in a child having great difficulty regulating their emotions and behaviour. Over the years, the understanding of children’s emotions and behaviour has changed. A few decades ago any emotional outburst was usually described as challenging behaviour. Challenging behaviour was viewed as something which had been inappropriately learnt and needed to be modified or changed using rewards or reinforcements. It was seen as a skills deficit and the way the child communicated their needs (see Gardner, Graeber-Whalen, & Ford, 2001 for an overview).

Emotionally Able sees a child’s challenging behaviour in terms of underlying emotional problems which can be seen as the child’s reaction to being under stress. Stress as the result of anxiety and anger is a normal reaction by anyone when feeling insecure, confused, frustrated or hopeless. If this is true for a resilient and mature adult how much more prevalent is it in vulnerable children who do not feel engaged, who lack supportive relationships and ultimately don’t feel positive about their world. Emotionally Able assumes that when behaviour is emotional you need to support the child’s underlying emotional needs to build resilience and help them to become emotionally able.

Emotionally Able initially drew from the work of Ferre Laevers who worked with young children who had emotional, but not learning, difficulties, and his development of the Leuven Involvement Scale (Laevers, 2011). His framework was extended by working with groups of staff in special schools. The experiences of school staff were used to broaden and deepen an understanding of the emotional well-being of children with severe and complex learning difficulties.

The original “experiential” approach of Laevers and his colleagues identified two key dimensions as central – the “emotional well-being” and the “level of involvement” of the learner:

“Well-being” indicates that the basic needs of the child are satisfied and refers to the degree to which children feel at ease, act spontaneously, show vitality and self-confidence. “Involvement” is evident when children are concentrated and focused, interested and fascinated and when they are operating at the very limits of their capabilities.

(Laevers, 2011, p. 1)

Emotionally Able has developed these two indicators reframing Involvement as Engagement, and Well-being as Feeling Positive and added an important third area – “Relationships”. This new framework provides a whole school approach for developing emotionally supportive classrooms and for supporting the emotional well-being and mental health needs of individual children under the three key headings:

Engagement: When a child is immersed in an activity which they find engaging, they can be in a state of “flow” (Laevers, 2005). They feel a positive emotional response arising from their ability to make progress or move forward with something that they see as important or meaningful.

Relationships: Good relationships depend upon the child being able to make secure attachments to adults. Secure attachments mean that the child can rely on the adults in the classroom to feel safe. These emotional relationships are both an end in themselves and the means of achieving learning and progress in the classroom.

Feeling Positive: To feel positive, the children must feel safe in school. Once they feel safe, they can begin to deal with the emotion of feeling loved. Through safety and love, confidence and resilience, they begin to emotionally develop in ways which underpin and support their well-being throughout their lives

The materials and information provided within this book have been created to break down what emotional needs can look like in children with severe and complex learning difficulties. It is our opinion that expression and then support for these needs will be similar across cultures. There will of course be differences based on the home and school environments that may change across countries. These differences could include but are not limited to differences in the following: guidance and education laws describing how children should be taught, behaviour support systems usually used by settings and schools, leadership styles of schools and language differences that have subtleties in how tone and expression is recognised and accepted. Our view is that, despite these differences, the materials within this book will be appropriate for children living across the world.

1.2 A whole school approach

A whole school approach to emotional well-being requires that the school, and the wider community of parents and professionals working within the school, share some common values and ways of doing things. It means that all parts of the school work together, and it requires the commitment of the school leadership team (SLT), governors, class teachers, LSAs and all staff, involving parents from the outset. Though Emotionally Able focusses largely on the children and young people, to become embedded and successful into the future any whole school approach must also respond to the needs of the whole community including staff, parents and families.

Emotionally Able takes a whole school approach by first reviewing how supportive and responsive the classroom environment is to the emotional needs of all the children. Schools and individual classes can then provide whole school and whole class support. Following this, individual strategies can be put in place for children whose emotional well-being remains a significant cause for concern.

The government is committed to improving the mental health support for children and young people (Parkin & Long, 2018). The DH and DfE’s jointly published Green Paper (2017) Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision sets out three key proposals to improve mental health support in schools:

• • To support school to identify and train a Designated Lead for mental health
• • To fund new Mental Health Support Teams linked to groups of primary and secondary schools
• • To pilot a 4-week waiting time to access NHS services

Emotionally Able is designed to be used by the present EWB coordinators and the proposed new Designated Lead for mental health in special schools in conjunction with the senior leadership team. The DfE recognises that the leadership team in schools need to take a whole school approach:

The culture, ethos and environment of the school can have a profound influence on both pupil and staff mental wellbeing. Environments that are hostile, aggressive, chaotic or unpredictable can be harmful to mental health, and can lead to stressful teaching and working conditions. Schools are in a unique position, as they are able to help prevent mental health problems by promoting resilience as part of an integrated, whole school approach that is tailored to the needs of their pupils.

(DfE, 2018, p. 8)

Arguments for the whole school approach

School planning for a whole school approach should focus on emotional well-being as well as both teaching and learning. It should focus on the emotional well-being of the whole community, staff and parents, as well as the children and young people. However, we acknowledge that Emotionally Able focusses largely on the children and young people.

Some of the arguments for the strength of a whole school approach are set out here:

1. The government is committed to whole school approaches. The first policy objective of the Green Paper (DH & DfE, 2017) is to Promote good mental health and well-being amongst all CYP through whole school approaches and effective joint working.
2. The research evidence from NICE shows that in mainstream schools the social and emotional well-being for both primary and secondary pupils is supported by schools adopting a whole school approach (NICE, 2008, 2009).
3. One of the problems in improving well-being in schools is that many schools (44% of primary schools and 56% of secondary schools) do not take a whole school approach to mental health provision (Brown, 2018). There is no information on special schools.
4. Whole school programmes need to focus on positive mental health rather than on behaviour problems: (Effective programmes) “adopt a whole school approach, are implemented continuously for more than a year and are aimed at promoting positive mental health rather than reducing conduct problems and anti-social behaviour” (Wells, Barlow, & Stewart-Brown, 2003, p. 197).
5. The Future in Mind report highlights the role of schools in the identification of need, t...