Part |
Cost |
Full Webinar: | FREE |
Running time
Full Webinar: 25 mins 55 secs
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Reflective Supervision
Very few schools have safe spaces for teachers to reflect and process the extremely stressful and painful experiences that happen to them in schools, and also to celebrate what’s going really well. Access to reflective supervision, safe spaces to discuss issues and problems, remains extremely low at only 8% of schools (Teacher Wellbeing Index 2020). So, staff take their stress home, often to off-load on a distracted partner who may not be that good at active listening anyway. As a result, all too many teachers end up with stress related Illness, secondary trauma, mental health problems and burn out. Many leave the profession as a result.
This webinar will discuss how this safe, confidential space empowers staff to talk frankly about their work in school with a trained psychologist or therapeutically trained senior educationalist. It takes a trauma informed approach, the child at the centre, but with a helicopter view, starting with the staff member and then widening to think about the school setting as a whole and the parent community. It’s not a therapy group, but it’s absolutely therapeutic to process stress-inducing relational experiences, get support from the group, share the challenges of school life and how to resolve tricky situations, explore how a particular child has triggered a traumatic memory, and gain new relational skills (that staff say hugely improve their home life as well as school life). Without this support in schools, which are essentially now front-line mental health services, we are guilty of emotional neglect for the very people who can make such a huge difference to the lives of our children.