Training isn’t the answer but it is part of it. Several of my son’s violent episodes while in primary school were mismanaged by teaching staff who had attended appropriate training but still had no idea how to support him. One incident arose from his sensory sensitivity escalating due to anxiety, and the teacher claimed never to have heard of sensory problems with autistic children, yet she’d been in a LA training session about it just weeks earlier. The point being, you can deliver training but if those attending aren’t interested, they won’t take it in and you’ve wasted your time. So part of the issue is having the right staff, who actually care about the children they’re working with and want to support them the best way they can.
Another issue is relationships with parents. It’s true that the majority of parents are very on the ball about their children’s triggers and how to prevent situations escalating towards meltdown, but teaching staff need to respect that parents are likely to have better insight into their child’s condition than they do and work together to meet the child’s needs. In my son’s final primary school, I took in masses of support tools that we used successfully at home to help him with anger management, self-awareness, anxiety and other problems, and the whole lot was put in a drawer and forgotten about. NOBODY read a word of it – I couldn’t understand why he was continuing to have such massive problems because I thought he was being supported appropriately, but in practice he had NO support at all.
As for restraint, my son’s school were very well aware that even the slightest touch when my son was anxious would lead to meltdown, yet still they would do so in an effort to calm him down. He would hit the roof and they ‘d end up restraining him and he too was locked in a room on his own on one occasion. Had they followed even half of the tools I’d provided for them he’d never have got to that point, but the arrogance that they knew better than I did prevailed and they destroyed him.
Teachers entering the profession should be aware that the usual practice is for children with SENs to be educated in mainstream schools. They will encounter those children and need to be prepared for them, either through their basic training or by their own research. In today’s education system it can’t be avoided and they can’t pick and choose who they support. If they don’t want to teach violent children then they need training to work appropriately with them so that they are less likely to become violent. As others have said, it really isn’t hard if you’re prepared to listen to and work with parents who know the child and what their triggers are. Proaction is the key to avoiding aggression, always.
Star also makes a good point (among many) that children with SEN are just as entitled to an education as any others, and their attendance at school should be about more than managing their behaviour. At present it seems to be about containment till they move up a year, and that’s not good enough.
IMO, the core of the problem is that the education system claims to have the resources to provide appropriate support for children with SEN in mainstream, when evidence screams that they clearly can not. We could do with a bit of honesty about how this system fails children with SENs, and the teachers who are put under enormous stress because they haven’t adequate provision to do better. Too many children are being harmed under the current system, and mine was one of them.