Communicating with others, establishing connections and teaching is in my blood (on both sides of my family). As is the case with most offspring, I strenuously denied I was in any respect like my parents, but in my late 20s, I accepted the inevitable and became a secondary school English teacher. I had no reason to think I wouldn’t stay in the job until retirement or death – whichever came first!
However, in 2013, a small, blonde tornado entered our lives with very little advance warning. We had exactly one week to prepare for the arrival of a boy of just under a year old.
I took a year of adoption leave, returned to work part time, but within two years, it was evident that our little boy was differently wired.
At nursery, he specialised in an overarm throw that would qualify him for any national cricket team and his favourite pastime was single-handedly recreating the Poseidon Adventure in the bathrooms with the taps and the toilet flush. We were not popular with the school caretaker.
His childminder was struggling with his extreme distress around transitions and finding his behaviour increasingly difficult to manage or understand using her (usually failsafe) skills.
One bedtime, our son told me that he was ‘bad’ and that he ‘made everyone sad.’
This was my introduction to the concept of shame. He had already internalized the idea that he was his behaviour. I knew nothing of shame and toxic stress at this point, but I knew that he wasn’t ‘bad’ and that his behaviour wasn’t a choice – it was a symptom of something bigger than him.
I took a career break for the rest of the school year and set about ‘fixing’ everything ahead of my return to my job.
It was then that trauma and neurodiversity ‘schooled’ the schoolteacher. It turns out that diagnoses are difficult to get, that even once they are given, there is no easy ‘fix’, a lengthy wait for medication, little by way of practical support and that, crucially, you can’t out-behaviour-manage brain-based differences, no matter how skilled you are in your professional life. You just end up becoming more and more frustrated that your strategies don’t work, whilst the child becomes more and more upset that you can't help them make sense of the world or their responses.
I didn’t return to my post the next school year. Or the one after that. In fact, I eventually resigned.
It is at this point that I began learning about the brain – about the brain’s responses to trauma, particularly in childhood, and about the brain-based, chronically underdiagnosed condition that is Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).
I was amazed that I had not, at any point in teacher training, or on any professional development course since, been told about neurobiology, about the fact that learners who are neurodiverse or with a background of trauma do not fit easily into a school system that relies heavily on frontal lobe skills like impulse control and an awareness of cause and effect and often assumes that because learners are safe in school that they feel safe in school. I realized I had taught learners – quite a few learners – whom I now realized were likely to have had developmental trauma and FASD that we knew nothing about.
My consultancy work began organically. First, I began to learn all I could with the aim of supporting my son to regulate, to cope with daily life and to try to ensure his primary school transition was successful. We were lucky to have some skilled and dedicated professionals who persisted through that first difficult year.
I was then asked by teaching colleagues to provide some support strategies for a young person with similar issues to my son – I delivered training, developed resources for them, worked alongside this young person and her caregivers for three years.
Things grew from there – I accepted a contract from a charity to develop and deliver education training on FASD for teachers; a company that provides support to young people with complex needs in England asked for training development and delivery on both FASD and Developmental Trauma; an FASD charity in New Zealand contracted me to develop and deliver online training (at 4.30am, UK time!); caregivers began to contact me about how to support school to understand their child's needs.
So, here I am – far from where I thought I would be, but privileged to be working with a whole host of valiant minds: education staff who are determined (often against the odds) to find a way to support learners; caregivers who are trying to navigate the school system whilst advocating for their children and the most valiant of all – children and young people themselves.
Ailsa Clarke
At its core, education begins with connection and relationships. Teachers know that young people learn when they feel safe, when their needs are understood and when they feel cared about. However, some learners are vulnerable to being misunderstood because of their behaviour. When people see behaviour as a symptom of a brain-based need, their perspective of that young person totally changes.
I love being in schools and working on a practical level alongside staff – they are resilient, resourceful and genuinely care about the needs of their learners.
Supporting caregivers to communicate positively with school gives me a lot of satisfaction, as does building relationships with the learners themselves.
The privilege of helping any one of these three groups is hugely rewarding, but when I help all three to work together, it’s incredible.
What's most enjoyable for me is that teaching is really about human connection. It is about listening and asking questions before sharing knowledge. - and not assuming that you know all there is to know about a subject. It is about understanding people’s perspectives; their skills and areas of vulnerability, what they want to learn and how they want to develop. It is about sometimes asking questions to probe beliefs and sometimes providing alternative perspectives.
The same is true of supporting education staff, caregivers or children and young people – it is about listening to begin with, building connection, sometimes providing new perspectives and ultimately, working together towards a goal.
Selfishly, the thing I love most about teaching is that I never stop learning – when I teach, I always leave with new knowledge!
Trauma and neurodiversities (particularly FASD) are complex. As such, there is no universal ‘quick fix,’ no ‘fresh-out-of-the-box’ set of strategies that solve things overnight. Mainstream education does not suit every learner.
Yet there are many children and young people who can remain and thrive in mainstream if those working with them have the knowledge and skills to reframe what they see using a brain-based lens. Trauma-informed approaches and a working knowledge of FASD as a brain-based condition allows us to look at ‘behaviour’ differently and shift from a reactive to a proactive approach.
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