Ideas for supporting children and young people

Ideas for supporting children and young people

Below are examples of methods that will support adults to elicit the child and young person's voice and share their point of view about aspects of school, home and how they feel.

"Compared to the fact that just two years ago, I was barely turning up to school. And now I'm literally upset if I miss a lesson" (young person).

Drawing

Ask the child or young person to draw or write about their thoughts and feelings about school. For example, ask them to draw what happens in their body when they are feeling both calm and worried.

Externalising

It can be useful to separate 'the problem' from the child or young person using an externalising approach. For example, asking questions such as:

• What name could you give the thought/s or feeling/s that you experience when you think about going to school?
• If the thought/feeling was a thing, what would it look like? What would it say?
• How does the …… get in the way of you attending school? When is ……….. in charge and when are you in charge?

“They choose a colour for it (the problem), give it a shape, and then we talk about it as the problem. So we're totally taking it away from the student. And so there's no blame attached. We're taking all that pressure off the student” (school staff).

Scaling

It may be useful to use resources such as a feeling thermometer or a scale to consider aspects within school that may be barriers. For example,

• The physical environment (toilets, corridors, assembly hall);
• Times of the day or social interactions, including, arriving at school, play and break times, lining up, lunchtimes, going home, changing for PE.
• Particular lessons or activities within lessons, including, writing, working as part of a group, reading aloud, verbally answering a question.

“I've learned the importance of learning in collaboration with the hospital education service worker and CAMHS. We had a multi agency approach and they advised us how much he could tolerate in terms of his anxiety, taught us some strategies around anxiety and how to use toolkits with him so he could grade his anxiety. With that particular situation, we got very good and he got very good at identifying his anxiety; he could put numbers to it and then learn how to manage it within school” (school staff).

Gaining their story

A life graph or path can help children and young people to discuss their ‘story so far’ and what they want for themselves in the future.

Solution-focused approaches

Asking the child or young person to build their 'ideal classroom' using blocks, figurines or drawing can provide information about what a child or young person would like to be different, rather than focusing on the difficulties.

Strengths and values cards can support a child or young person to communicate how they perceive themselves, what is important to them, how they would like to be seen and whether they would like anything to be different. Using this approach could support the child or young person to communicate how the school, parent or carer could promote development of these strengths or values in different environments to develop self-esteem and confidence as well as a sense of belonging.

Card sorts

Risk and resilience cards can help inform adults what the child or young person's difficulties are, as well as supportive factors that are already in place. The process of using these cards enables the child or young person to communicate non-verbally, as well as consider what they would like to be different. The findings from these could inform what school, parents and carers attempt to do more of and put in place and what could be changed or reduced to promote push factors to school.

Using feeling cards, for example, 'Bear Cards', can support children and young people to identify different feelings that they experience in different contexts. Adults supporting them are able to communicate how they might feel in different situations, to promote emotional literacy and extend their emotional vocabulary as well as normalise and validate their feelings.