To think that teachers need more training for coping with violent/ SEN children

[ReallyTired]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29111528

Clearly a distress child should not have been locked in a room. However I can see how it could have happened. I feel that better training could have helped these teachers deal with a diffciult situation better.

For example training teachers in how to restrain a child safely, descalation techniques and improving communication skills would help. A school always has the option of calling the police for an out of control child.

"It would be far more useful to have specialists to come in to school to show how to support an individual child."

Parents who take an interest in their own child could do this, they are far more specialist than anyone else. For assessed but non-statemented kids, it takes a step out of the current 'Chinese whispers' system that so often falls down. e.g. Ed Psych/SALT writes a report, SENCO interprets that report using their own personal filters and lets individual teachers know what that pupil needs from them. Teacher may not 'get' SEN or feel that the recommendations are 'pandering' to something they don't see, so don't implement them. This is vital intervention for the kids who mask, but whose parents and other professionals are 'not believed'.

I know that the comments here have been largely about children with SEN. However, I have experienced a child with no SEN have a violent, out of control outburst at school, in reaction to something that was happening in his life outside school.

As it happened, the TeamTeach training that we had as part of our general training came in useful, but it was genuinely 'out of the blue' [well, we could have been warned had the wider family felt able to share what was happening to / around them with the school - but there were multiple reasons why that did not happen].

So even if we are well-informed about all of our children with SEN [over 35% of that class, i remember], it may well be one of the other 65% who is violent on a single, dramatic occasion!

"If you meet their needs, lower their anxiety and make them happy as is their right as human beings, then they're less likely to meltdown, the same as the rest of us. They aren't actually that different you know."

The point is - as illustrated in the case I mentioned - the school may not be the body failing to meet a child's needs or create their anxiety. If a child is so far from beuing happy, so anxious, so angry, so far from having their needs met in their lives outside school, then in some cases whatever happens at school, the child may explode.

Hurr1cane

the "probably" in your sentence says it all, you are making an assumption.

"They aren't actually that different you know."

Thank you for being condescending.

I will say it again in a more forthright manner.

Sometimes you do all that you can and shit still happens.

Mumof6 I have explained why parents can't be trained in restraint. It's to do with insurance and who is responsible for making sure your training is kept up to date, and who is responsible if there's an accident during restraint that you've been trained in and you want to sue. (not that you would personally but it's what might happen)

Unfortunately because of the suing and insurance culture we have, no one is willing to train parents.

That's the way it is. I've been angry about it, fought for it, then accepted it.

School may not be, so if school see the families needs aren't being met then they need to refer the families to outreach programmes and social services disability team to help them.

Or, you can just leave it to parent volunteers who run groups off their own backs to try and put the pieces of broken families together.

And before someone says that is not the schools job, it is now, they're supposed to work as part of multi agencies to support the whole child. For every child.

"School may not be, so if school see the families needs aren't being met then they need to refer the families to outreach programmes and social services disability team to help them."

Absolutely. The multi-agency meeting was convened in record-quick time and the situation never recurred. But the point I am making is that that initial violent incident could not have been prevented opr pre-empted by the school. As soon as it happened, we moved heaven and earth to get support for the family - and we would have done so before, had we had the information from anyone with which to act. The outburst was, literally, the first we knew of it.

So we could - and did - act as part of a multi-agency eam to prevent a SECOND outburst. But we couldn't prevent the first IYSWIM?

Teacher with two kids,

My post wasn't in response to yours, that situation, a child without SEN with nothing on file telling you that he was hurting by lashing out isn't something you can control, no.

That's shit, but I bet you saw it as your job and did all you could to help the child.

What I'm talking about was children who's needs aren't being met outside the home causing them anxiety which is known to the school.

And, if their specific needs aren't being met at home, and the parents don't take on the advice of professionals, the parents can lose their child.

I have, as you can imagine, wracked my brains and examined my cionscience many times in the years since - did we miss signs? Should we have picked up the issues sooner? How could we have communicated better with those hard-to-reach parents|? Did we overlook a sign or change in the child themselves? Of course, I beat myself up about it - the child suiffered more than they needed to. But I can genuinely say that it came out of the blue.

Thanks for clarifying - sorry for final cross post. The solution did not end up with quite the same poeple sharing the same house, let us put it that way.

You can't know everything, that poor child. You did what you could as soon as you knew.

For children with SEN teachers already know, have professional advice, and quite often ignore it.

Hi mr headteacher, why are you lecturing my none verbal child for his bad behaviour?

Well, I'm telling him off.

Really mr headteacher? Even though you've been told to take him to time out and ignore him? He doesn't understand you, you are rewarding his bad behaviour with attention

Well, telling him off isn't a reward.

Oh mr headteacher, you probably are the most stupid person I have ever met.

Anyway he had been sacked now.

I can't believe the bollox on here
My Dsis was stabbed by a student with a compass. I wish that little shit had been locked in a room.the staff's first priority should be protecting themselves and other students rather than pussyfooting round a dangerous little shit child

Exactly teacher - and that's why I took exception to the thread title, because it set up the assumption that the violent child is always the child with SEN. And often it isn't. There's no reason that a child with SN, whose needs are bing met would be violent. In fact, many children with SN are more likely to be targets of violence in school. My own DS is exceptionally gentle but his poor reading of social situations means he doesn't get the 'early warning' that a child may be angry, or a bully.

Conversely I know a child with ASD who is repeatedly pushed and goaded by other members of his class until he explodes and hits out. He's not the one with violent tendencies in his class

Blanklook I agree that parents can be a mine of information. Especially with regards to what can trigger a child of they do have violent outbursts.

However not all parents are able to offer this information. Some are in denial about their child. Sometimes knowing a child extremely well in an everyday environment doesn't help with strategies to ensure access to the curriculum.

I cannot really say what will set my ds. I'm right about 50% of the time. The strategies I use at home would be difficult to use in school and some impossible.

Did that child have SN icy?

Sorry that happened to your sister.

Lonny my DS us very much like that. Now his needs are being met he is such a gentle, loving little soul.

He was at the skate park once and this boy was taking the piss out of him for not being able to talk, following him round, screaming in his face and taking the piss out of the way he walks. The boys dad was there.

I said to the boys dad, your child is being really unkind, he needs telling, he did nothing, so I told him that DS was getting really wound up, but he just laughed.

I kept redirecting DS, the older boys at the park kept getting in the bullies way so he couldn't get near DS, anyway eventually DS turned around and punched him in the face.

Cue tears and the dad giving me evils.

Obviously I could not let my DS think it was ok to lash out, but I also didn't want him to think it was ok for him to be tormented. So I said "no DS, we don't hit bullies, we come to mum"

Bullies dad then tried to slag DS off to other parents who just said "well, maybe your child will learn not to bully disabled children now"

Our experience of mainstream education ended badly. Discrimination, illegal exclusions, failure to adhere to terms of statement, ignoring advice/recommendations given by OTand physiotherapy and autism outreach, but by far the worst thing was not reporting incidents to the LEA. Nobody asked for more training but when the placement broke down completely the school were offered more training, too little too late for my child who wished he was dead.
I ended up begging the school to admit to the LEA that they could not meet my child's needs and when they finally did it took many months to get a place in specialist provision.
7 key stage 1 and 7 key stage 2 places available in an ASD unit in a city with a population of over 400,000. No specialist secondary provision, ASD prevalence according to some sources is 1 in 100, other sources have this figure at 1 in 80.

For those who think that it is easy to place a child in specialist provision please believe me, it is not.

I would also say, to an extent, it s a numbers / capacity game. If I have 1 child with SEN in a class, I can be the absolute expert on their needs and read up on their SEN and be ready to respond to every situation.

If I have 10, or 15, in a single class, often with very conflicting needs / presentations of SEN, I simply cannot be as expert on each one of them as I would like to be. I cannot, for example, ensure that A has the silence he needs, while Y meets his need for e.g. drumming, or calls out uncontrollably becauser that is part of their condition.

Many schools do only have 1 or 2 children with SEN in each class so do not face the problem. It is, genuinely, humanly, extremely hard when there are up to 50% of a class with SEN, even with a TA or 2 for support.

I had 5 in my class with known SEN, 6 with abusive/neglectful backgrounds and 15 who were generally behind with everything with the odd behavioural concern, and 2 gifted and talented.

I managed fine.

(With a lot of sticker charts and prize boxes)