Doing us out of a job?

A new report by Ofsted has highlighted exactly how the top 20 primary schools in deprived areas are managing to achieve excellent outcomes. Funnily enough, their values and ethos are not so different from our own, as child therapists.

Here are a few examples:

1 Staff visit homes before the child starts school

I am convinced that most issues that young people present with at this age have much to do with home life in one way or another and that seeing how things happen in the home and the dynamics of the relationships there is key to helping the child.

2 Pupils discuss their learning and learn about learning

Most young people really want to understand what is happening to them and why. It empowers them and makes them feel there is hope for change. This is as true emotionally as of learning – and often the two are closely connected anyway.

3 Schools tackle concerns about special needs early on in the nursery and reception classes

We always want to make an early intervention to avoid later more complex and costly ones. And – in a school counselling situation, at least – we rely on the staff being aware of mental health issues and referring children appropriately and in good time.

4 Calmness is encouraged in school as it compensates for children’s very turbulent backgrounds

The calm atmosphere of the therapy room (on our part!) enables the children to confront issues and work on them. If this is reiterated in the classroom, the brain’s thinking parts will be able to function so much more effectively.

5 There is a strong and explicit focus on play, sociability and enjoyment

Too few children have these opportunities these days and I applaud these schools for realising what matters. Play is how children learn. Sociability is how they will learn to get on with adults in later life. Enjoyment is often lacking except in our rooms!

The reason Ofsted has published this report is to enable other schools to learn from best practice.

Best practice for therapists is a somewhat thorny issue, since the RCTs are not done in a real situation. However, this list from America names a few therapies that they reckon are best practice (scroll down to the set of slides headed ‘Identified Best Practices’), including Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (you can read a case study here), Trauma Focused CBT, Multisystemic Therapy, and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy.

Play therapy, on the other hand, recognises both directive and non-directive modes for treatment of trauma, as is evidenced in this excellent article by the Trauma Awareness and Treatment Center (an American outfit – hence the spelling!).

This is a long post – I hope you find something useful in it!