The Piper Model

Personalised Interventions Promoting Emotional Resilience in children with Social, Emotional and Mental Health Needs

Dennis Piper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138040526
• eBook ISBN: 9781351705547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is intended to be both a practical evidence-based tool and an awareness-raising resource for teachers, teaching assistants, mentors and all adults who work with children and young people who present as 'extremely challenging' in the school context.

In every school there are a small number of pupils, less than five percent, who take up more than fifty percent of the staff's time. This book provides school staff with an approach to personalised interventions that enable those children or young people to build life-long resilience skills.

CHAPTER 1

PREPARING FOR THE JOURNEY

This chapter is divided into six sections. It involves looking at the backdrop to the development of this practical and evidence-based mental health resource for teacher-practitioners or adults involved in supporting children with social, emotional and mental health needs. It outlines the legislative policy shift incorporating a new special educational needs and disabilities framework for working with children and families as the central focus. It outlines the impact of the teacher on the emotional well-being of both children and themselves. It introduces us to the concept of understanding behaviour as communication and how this can be better understood through a child-centred model that reflects ‘what the child is telling us’.

Each section is as follows:

Section 1: Introduction and overview

Section 2: The PIPER model and the assess, plan, do, review process

Section 3: The impact of the teacher

Section 4: The conversation

Section 5: The emotional well-being journey – from practice to three-step intervention

Section 6: An overview of the three-step PIPER model – an emotional well-being Intervention

• Step 1 – Risk and resilience (R&R) profiling
• Step 2 – Creating a reducing anxiety management plan (RAMP)
• Step 3 – Creating a personalised three-wave provision map (PM)

SECTION 1

1. Introduction and overview

Personalised interventions promoting emotional resilience is known as the ‘PIPER model’. The PIPER model is both a practical evidence-based tool and awareness-raising resource for teachers, SENCos, teaching assistants, mentors and all adults who work with children and young people who present as worrying and challenging in the school context.

This resource will assist school staff in making a transition in their thinking following recent policy and governmental changes. The new SEN/D code of practice (DfE, DoH, January, 2015) changed the previous special educational needs (SEN) descriptor of behaviour, emotional and social difficulties (BESD), which historically embodied the concept that ‘the child needs fixing’, to social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs: ‘we need to look at the child holistically’. This embodies the new concept of the child and the family at the centre of everything we do.

This resource provides the reader with both the rationale for the shift in government legislation and policy from BESD to SEMH and an effective and evidence-based process of putting that policy into practice. This process is illustrated on page 28. Also, this resource provides the reader with a practical, tried and tested way of working, as schools continue to struggle with children and young people whose behaviours cause them on-going concerns.

The established modus operandi that created a polarised system of dealing with behaviour under the pastoral system or the SEN system has resulted in an exclusionary mindset: the pastoral system too frequently leading to permanent exclusion and the SEN system too often placement outside the mainstream system, thus reinforcing the child or young person’s sense of rejection or non-belongingness including no incentive to change, understand or manage their behaviours and to learn how to self-soothe and self-regulate.

SECTION 2

Figure 1. The PIPER model and the assess, plan, do, review process

Planning, implementing, monitoring, reviewing and evaluating for a pupil with mental health/emotional well-being needs (Piper, 2016)

This resource will support school staff to work in an alternative and truly child-centred way in assisting the child or young person to increase their resilience factors and counteract their risk factors and in the process to be supported in learning how to self-soothe and self-regulate.

It is unique in its approach as, rather than focus on ‘retraining’ the child through a pre-packaged programme of social and emotional learning (SEL), it provides the reader with a rationale for understanding what drives the individual child or young person’s behaviour. For children and young people with emotional well-being or mental health needs, due to high-risk factors and minimal resilience (or protective) factors in their lives, display correspondingly significant high levels of ‘anxiety-driven’ behaviours.

SECTION 3

1. The impact of the teacher

This resource enables the reader to understand and draw on their own inner resources when challenged through a process of emotional introspection and reflection; it provides a clear, coherent and collaborative system of planned and personalised responses within interventions to support the child or young person in a communication dialogue with their teachers and support staff, which in turn provides the space for them to change their behaviour and build their levels of resilience.

Anyone in contact with a child has an impact on that child’s mental health and psychological wellbeing. The challenge for all of us is to remember that and to be able to respond if things start to go wrong.

‘Children and young people in mind: final report of the CAMHS review’

(2008)

This resource will, first, assist school staff to understand behaviour as a form of communication. Second, it will provide them with the necessary tools to be truly child-centred; in other words, to constantly ask: ‘what is the child telling me that he or she needs?’ and to support children in building the resilience they need not only to be a successful pupil but also to grow into an adult with robust mental health. In short,

It challenges us to understand behaviour as communication and to remain curious about what is being communicated rather than leaping to conclusions.

Sarah Brennan (Young Minds)

SECTION 4

1. The conversation

So, how am I going to guide you through this emotional well-being journey? Well, in my work with teachers, we normally have a conversation irrespective of numbers; it is so much easier than being told what to do! These conversations are usually peppered with our own ‘therapeutic’, humourous, even personal manic anecdotes, not uncommon to those of us working in the world of ‘difficulty’ versus ‘need’. However, they are always linked with sensitive and frequently uncomfortable behaviours that are too often the manifestations of underpinning interactive influences, regularly driving children’s emotions and anxieties to, in some cases, toxic levels, culminating in distress for all concerned. These are known as high risk and low resilience factors and, will have disproportionately ‘shaped’ all our lives to some degree from an early age, some with an indelible effect on our thinking and behaviours, both positively and negatively! But, I believe that where there is resilience there is hope and that is both the beginning and end of our journey – via a conversation on paper!

I hear what you’re saying … but what are you telling me?

SECTION 5

1. The emotional well-being (EWB) journey – from practice to three-step intervention

For over 30 years as a behaviour support teacher and consultant, too often my Monday morning began in a school with a teacher ‘at the end of their tether’. The frequency of occurrence increased around the October half term and usually concerned th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Forewords
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Preparing for the Journey
• Chapter 2: What is behaviour? – behaviour as communication
• Chapter 3: Moving from BESD to SEMH
• Chapter 4: Factors to consider in preparation for the three-step PIPER model emotional well-being intervention
• Chapter 5: PIPER model step 1 – completing a risk and resilience profile
• Chapter 6: PIPER model step 2 – completing a reducing anxiety management plan
• Chapter 7: PIPER model step 3 – completing a personalised three-wave provision map
• Chapter 8: The PIPER model in practice: two case studies
• Chapter 9: Epilogue: Where do we go from here?
• References
• Useful addresses and contacts
• Useful websites
• Glossary of terms
• Index