Mental Times - KS1 behaviour and the school system

To kick-start June and the summer months, we’re bringing you a new feature spot. One which will become a monthly addition to the blog and newsletter and will see the Fortis gang address a recent mental health or wellbeing issue that’s been discussed in the news.

This month it is the TES’s discussion surrounding KS1 disruptive behaviour being on the up, a discussion which stemmed from comment made by Catherine Sargent – an assistant head for KS1 in the West Midlands – highlighting that physical behaviour such as children hurting children as well as adults and the destruction of school property were being seen across year 1, 2 and reception.

While the TES piece goes on to caveat that ‘it’s hard to say exactly how common this pattern is across the country’ it does also lead on to say that ‘a report in 2021 from the Education Endowment Foundation found that 76% of schools, looking specifically at the autumn 2020 cohort of children, needed ‘more support’ than previous years’. Which of course begs the question, why?

From our point of view, there is no skirting around the fact that referrals for children and young people have risen dramatically, as has the demand for our work within school settings – across the entire spectrum, not just SEND schools or those in special measures. Children are struggling, and the question of why that is, has to be entertained. The pandemic has been blamed entirely for the issues we’re seeing, with isolation, lockdowns, at-home learning all being banded together as being responsible for the limited opportunities children have had for socialising and developing skills such as sharing, turn-taking, emotional regulation.

A further question posed by the TES, is what can schools do to address these problems? A question which lead us on to another recent article from Dr Naomi Fisher over on Progressive Education. Taking the original debate topic one step further, Dr Fisher talks about the tidal wave of referrals for children and young people that she is currently experiencing – just as we are – pointing out that currently it shows no sign of slowing down or reducing in size.

Looking at the issue as a medical doctor would in regard to physical symptoms, Fisher raises the idea of ‘examining the contradiction at the heart of how we educate our children, whether perhaps the way we are schooling our children has some serious weaknesses – and in fact could be causing intense distress for many’. Looking at the mental health issues children are presenting and solving those issues is at best a band aid, as with most if not all issues discussed between our therapists and our clients, there is a bigger fix needed. Therapy works to give clients tools to be able to help themselves when they encounter situations that may cause known issues to become once again exacerbated. But the root cause is where our attention needs to be. The old adage of prevention being better than a cure could not be more true in this case. We need to take a long hard look at the school system, how it works and if it is indeed setting children up to fail.

One point Fisher takes time to discuss is focussed on children’s autonomy, or lack of it as they progress through the school system. Meaning the ability to make your own decisions to manage and govern yourself, autonomy in the education system peaks at age 3. Which when you look at a nursery setting makes total sense. Children are generally allowed to decide what they do and when, what they play with and how, and with whom. In a thriving nursery environment children are allowed to manage themselves in that safe space. They can chop and change between the activities available, and they choose to, navigating the offering alongside how they’re feeling, taking into account those who are around them also. But it doesn’t stay that way for long.

As soon as the curriculum comes into play, those moments of autonomy begin to reduce. What adults want children to do takes over from what they feel like they want to do to keep themselves happy and content so that they ‘don’t fall behind’.

Obviously there are certain skills that need to be taught, but how children learn them is potentially something that we really need to be putting under the microscope. Are we really focussing on what is important? Things children love to do, things that make them smile, are side-lined to ‘playtime’ activities, meaning the rest of their time is given over to what adults think children should be doing.  Time for creativity, for example, is reduced as children progress through their education with these activities decreasing until being non-existent by years 5 and 6.  Could there be another way, a hybrid way of learning and playing to ensure children and young people remain content throughout education?

One of our therapists Sarah, spends much of her time working with children and young people, both through referrals and within the school setting. A big theme she is seeing coming through at the minute is attachment difficulty. A therapeutic approach that can be used with clients of any age, attachment-based therapy is designed to focus on developing trust between client and therapist through expressing emotions while looking at our early experiences of attachment with our primary caregivers, usually parents/carers, and our resulting ability to develop healthy emotional and physical relationships in our adult years.

For Sarah, on a day-to-day basis, she is working with children and young people on interacting with peers, learning to share and play. She is finding utilising Lego and playing techniques – such as those we teach on our Therapeutic Toolkit Series of workshops – help children and young people develop the skills they need to interact with others.

For Sarah, and a lot of our therapists working within children and young people, creating space for children to be with peers outside the classroom environment too, and learning how to interact though play has been a vital addition in client development.

Unfortunately, the complexities we are seeing are a response to the ‘system’ – the expectations and how education is planned and measured as being effective.  The education system is delivering what the government has prioritised as being important – most would argue this needs to be reviewed.  In schools, Early Years has been the topic of many conversations with us – children are not ready to learn but the measures for effectiveness remain the same, putting school teams under inordinate pressure for results.

We need to acknowledge too the role that technology is having on the development of young brains, often watching on their own, affecting their capacity to retain information, to be engaged with others and in other activities, to read and the appropriateness of the content, as well as the hormonal responses potentially leading to addictive responses.

Working collaboratively with schools to create trauma and emotion-informed environments, giving children the tools they need to recognise their emotions and how to deal with them all the while looking too at how education itself can adapt. The constant comparison between children who are all at different mental developmental stages needs addressing, the conditions within which children are learning need to become healthier not distressing. And it will take time. There’s no skirting around that. But the sooner we work together to acknowledge the problem, reflect and work to change it the better.

“Most adults know that their psychological wellbeing is improved when they can make meaningful choices in their life, when they are not afraid or shamed and when they are not constantly comparing themselves against others.  We seem to forget that the same principles apply to young people,” Fisher concludes. We couldn’t agree more.