At our school we believe in the importance of relationships, ensuring children and young people feel valued, safe and secure, providing a sense of connection with a member of staff and a belonging to the whole school community. Our school reflects the values of the Trauma Informed Schools (TIS) Approach to understanding behaviour and supporting emotional wellbeing.

The six principles of the trauma-informed approach and practice are:

Safety

We must ensure we understand what safety means to individual, families and communities. If we don’t, we will not be able to ensure a sense of safety for ALL. We must ensure we create safety for those who have different experiences form our own. This means we must consider all ages, cultures, races, and demographics of people. We must consider staff and co-workers. Safety means awareness of the physical, emotional, and interpersonal safety.

Trust

Services, operations, and decisions must be made with transparency to ensure that we build and maintain trust with service recipients and staff. When we uphold trust and transparency, we are open about the process of making difficult decisions and we invite other voices to participate and collaborate. Trust starts with a culture of connection in relationships. Many people who have experienced trauma have experience unsafe and disrespectful interactions and do not support the building of resilience to deal and manage with difficult life situations.

Peer Support

This principle is about the culture of peer support into the whole services. Creating opportunities for peer support and self-help throughout the service, including staff support. A service that promotes peers support focuses on mutuality and possibility. Authenticity and vulnerability are essential to this work. Creating deeper mutual connections with service recipients and staff and between staff members and leaders is vital.

Collaboration

A collaborative approach demonstrates an intentional shoulder to shoulder approach and breaks down hierarchies. It is essential that power differentials are broken down and the principle of multiutility and standing together it embedded throughout the organisation.

Empowerment, voice and choice

Organisations, staff, and communities must believe in the possibility of recovery. Services must shine a light on the strengths and abilities we see with people and communities and support and build inner resilience. Many people with past trauma have experienced coercion therefore choice is important. A person must always have choice.

Cultural, historical and gender issues

The service that actively moves past cultural stereotypes and biases (e.g., based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, geography) offers a gender responsive service, promotes the value and worth of cultural connections and addresses historical trauma. We endeavour to make sure that at our school these values run through all the school policies and practice.

A Relational Behaviour Model 

At our school we adopt and use the relational behaviour model which is the approach from TIS.

The key principles are as follows:

• Behaviour is something to interpret.
• Children and young people are prone to make mistakes and highly responsive to the environment and context.
• Behaviour management is predominantly through relationships.
• Children/young people who don’t manage should be understood and included.
• Boundaries and limits are to keep everyone safe and to meet everyone’s needs.
• Rule should be developed together and adapted where needed.
• Consequences are only used within a process of restore and repair.
• ‘Inappropriate behaviour’ is a sign of unmet need, stress (difficulty in coping), lack of understanding and skills.
• The causes of the difficulties are mostly in the environment and within the context of relationships.
• The solutions lie in understanding what the behaviour tells us about the child/young person and their need.
• Practice and policy effectiveness is measured by wellbeing and the capacity to adapt and make reasonable adjustments to meet the needs.

General Expectations

We have high expectations for our children and young people, while recognising some children and young people have specific needs. The following expectations cover all times of the school day and where children and young people are representing the school out of hours or off site.

This means we:

• Encourage a positive attitude to learning within a safe, happy environment
• Promote high expectations and enable children/young people to become independent responsible learners
• Encourage a sense of respect for our community and our environment
• Believe that clear, consistent routines and systems are essential to support children and young people’s development and ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of everyone in our school community.

It is everyone’s responsibility to remind and support children and young people where these expectations are not met. Equally it is important to comment positively when they are. Staff model expected behaviours, attitudes and habits.

We believe that all behaviour is communication, and it is our job as adults to understand what that behaviour is telling us. We need to become ‘stress detectives’ and ascertain both why, and why now. Finding the cause of the behaviour will help us to work alongside the child or young person in order to help them to regulate themselves both in the short term and in the longer term through developing strategies to aid their resilience.