Our Journey to becoming an Attachment and Trauma Informed School.
Everything we do - our words, actions, postures, planning, organisation and what we do not do, contributes to behaviour management. It is our aim to develop a child’s capacity to manage their behaviours appropriately by empathising with them and educating them about the emotions they are experiencing and by building positive relationships to work towards a solution to change the behaviour patterns that can sometimes become habitual or, at moments of crisis, feel uncontrollable. We do this by creating a highly nurturing environment to ensure that the children feel happy, safe and secure.
Shortly before the Covid-19 lock down Sherbrook Primary School embarked on a mission to become an attachment and trauma in formed school. We began our journey by completing the Staffordshire Trauma Informed Attachment Aware School evaluation form STIAA-SEF).
The meticulous analysis of the STIAA-SEF highlighted that not all staff had sufficient and up-to-date knowledge surrounding behaviour, attachment and trauma. An audit of the behaviour management systems used in classes revealed an inconsistency in the types of charts being used to successfully manage pupils’ behaviour. After engaging staff in conversations and then holding a staff meeting, it was clear that the current ‘traffic light’ system (where negative behaviours were recognised and managed publicly not the positive behaviours) was only working for a small minority of the pupils in the school. Some pupils remained on ‘green’ all year, whereas the behaviour of other pupils would escalate when their name was moved to ‘red’. These pupils felt ‘named and shamed’.
After meeting with SLT it was agreed that the traffic light system needed to be changed. Several members of staff read ‘When the Adult Changes Everything Changes’ and we agreed that two class teams would trial the positive recognition boards in our classes. This helped when introducing the recognition boards to the whole-staff team, because we were able to draw upon our knowledge and experiences of implementing them in our classes, as well as how the pupils had responded to them.
The behaviour policy was amended and shared with all staff in light of the changes we had made and taking account of current guidelines and legislation.
In addition to this, two members of staff completed the ELSA (Emotional literacy Support Assistant) training which has been cascaded down to all staff. We have created a referral system and have started to deliver high quality ELSA support to targeted pupils.
Staff were given opportunities to be trained in; Emotion Coaching, ACE’s, Polyvagal theory, restorative and relational practices, Autism reality experience, Understanding the brain and trauma and the developing brain to name just a few of the training sessions.
All school staff were starting to adopt a unanimous ethos of showing care and understanding, listening, unpicking behaviours and working out positive solutions to support all children to regulate.
Opportunities to regulate in and out of the classroom are given throughout the day with classrooms having their own trampettes, spinning chairs, swings, moving boards, sensory circuits.
We applied for the ARC, Alex Timpson Award and we won! We were delighted that our hard work had been recognised and that the work we had put in to supporting our staff and children had been recognised.
We are now delighted to have been selected to be a Specialist setting Learning Hub with ARC. We hope to share our journey with others and impart our knowledge and practice on the impact of building positive relationships, our journey to becoming an attachment aware school and emotional regulation for children with special educational needs.