In the I Matter Project we have 3 training pathways: Parent-Child Coaching, Professional-Child Coaching and Professional-Parent-Child Coaching. Professional-Child Coaching is something that most professionals in schools and residential care settings do without thinking about it. Coaching involves guiding the child towards the understanding and skills that the professional knows will be useful and helpful to them in their lives. I Matter Professional-Child Coaching has many similiarites. There are also 5 key differences: i) In comparison to regular professional-child coaching I Matter Professional-Child Coaches start out by being intrroduced to a clear map or framework around child development, brain development and the adult role. This framework is designed to help them to understand and then decide what to coach and why. Caring for children especially complex children with social emotional difficulties can be very challenging with so many decisons to make. It really helps to have an explicit map that explains how lots of ideas fit together in the area of social-emotional development. ii) Professionals who are learning about I Matter Coaching are provided with some easy to understand assessment tools. These easy to understand developmentally informed tools are designed to make it very clear what key skills are important and why and how they are linked. They are also designed to highlight when further assessment is needed. iii) Due to the advanced training involved, I Matter Professional-Child Coaches find that they are much more aware of what is happening and have much greater understanding of what they are seeing during the everyday challenging incidents of life with the child in class or residential settings. This helps them to have clarity and focus in their role. iv) I Matter Coaching places a very high emphasis on the role, skills and well-being of the adult coach themselves. The special thing about this approach is that it is very clear from the outset that in order to be effective and appealing you have to do the work that supports your own well-being first! Blaming others doesn't get you to where you want to go. v) I Matter Professional-Child Coaching provides professionals with a framework for a longer-term approach founded on strengthening the security and effectiveness of the adult-child attachment relationship at home and at school in the support of promoting social emotional development. This approach aims to join together other learning that parents and professionals access in other places. vi) I Matter Professional Child Coaching is relevant for all children of any age where there is a concern to support social-emotional development. Children may be very typical, or they may present with some complex challenges. They may have a formal diagnosis of ASD or ADHD or ODD or something else, or they may have no clear diagnosis. This is a framework that focusses on primarily on the adults undesstanding and skiills. I Matter Professional-Child Coach training is based on a 3 step process of learning the framework, understanding the tools, and on learning how to work for results. I developed I Matter Professional-Child Coach training because of my concern based on years of professional practice. My concern is that we have large numbers of children in school and residential settings who have not mastered the foundations of social-emotional development. More seriously and more significantly, in spite of an industry dedicated to assessment of children these social emotional gaps are being systematically missed even in our most vulnerable children. Failure to see the extent of the gaps means that many children are spending large portions of their day in schools on curriculum based activity that are missing the point and missing the extent of the real underlying difficulties. If you invest in professional-child coach training you will gain staff on your team who will be able to help you start to recognise these gaps more systematically. Be warned however: You may be shocked at what this will show. If you would like to learn more take a look at our courses
0 Comments
https://www.nfer.ac.uk/nfer/PRE_PDF_Files/01_25_06.pdf
According to the recently published Lancashire Children and Young People’s Resilience, Emotional and Mental Health and Well-Being Transformation Plan for 2015-2020, it is recognised that:
The newly published Transformation Plan notes that:
This is important but shocking information. In the I Matter Project however we contend that there is also a key gap in models for practice in child and family work. We argue in particular that in spite of the rhetoric of evidence-based practice there is no practice model in child and family work that adequately connects up the relationship between adult well-being, child well-being and development. There is also a gap in models of service delivery that can respond to the sheer scale of the current unmet needs. What we think is therefore needed is some big picture innovative thinking about what is really underpinning the rise in child mental health difficulties, and some lateral thinking about how the difficulties might be more meaningfully addressed. If you would like further information click here to take a look at our courses Or to read the full report click here Sometimes when I start talking about the I Matter Project I can feel a little embarrassed. The thing is, the issues the project is addressing are really not rocket science. It is not as if I am speaking about things that people don't already sort of know. The difficulty is that ideas and issues that seem quite straightforward, are not actually happening when it comes to practice. Everyone knows for example that parenting is important when it comes to helping children, but parent education is not anyone's primary business As a result, what should be happening, is not actually happening. So here are 6 reasons that your school or service needs a parent education strategy: i) Mental health outcomes are massively impacted by parenting competence ii) Educational outcomes are massively impacted by parenting competence iii) Challenging behaviour and Youth offending outcomes are massively impacted by parenting competence iv) Parenting lack of confidence is widespread v) Hoping that 'someone' will address the parenting issues means that you have left responsibility for a massive factor that will impact on your own outcomes to someone else. vi) Anything less than a clear strategy is unlikely to make a dint on the scale of the unmet needs Hope that is enough to get you thinking. If you would like to join our Action Research Network to explore these issues in more depth with other professionals, you can get more information by clicking here Attachment Theory? What's that? In my work I regularly encounter significant lack of understanding amongst professionals and parents about the meaning or relevance of Attachments for those who work with children. However in my view Attachment Theory is one of the most important areas of psychological thinking for anyone who works with children with complex needs. It is one of the key foundations of the practical framework that I call The I Matter Framework. Attachment Theory refers to a body of work first developed by a researcher John Bowlby and by a research group which included Mary Ainsworth (photo on the left) best known for her work on something called The Strange Situation Studies. These specific studies are some which I think it is vital for all professionals and parents to understand. The original works, listed below, deserve a read if you ever have a very long holiday as they represent an extraordinarily detailed piece of careful observational work, but, if you don't have time for this, even a basic understanding can take you forward. Attachment Theory is now a very well-established body of work which describes the relationship that a child has with the adult figures on whom he or she depends. It makes a very clear distinction between children who have a secure relationship with their key carers and those who have an insecure relationship. This research has clearly established a powerful link between patterns of early attachment relationships and a wide range of educational and mental health outcomes. Here are 5 reasons why I think Attachment Theory is so important: 1. Attachment Theory provides a universal framework - that helps us to understand ourselves and our own reactions, not just those of our children An attachment refers to the relationship that a younger vulnerable person develops with a bigger more powerful older figure that he/she depends upon - it is usually used to describe the relationship between a infant and his or her first primary carers. Attachment Theory draws our attention to the fact that for young children this need to depend on someone else for care is as universal and fundamental as hunger. As children we all had a basic need to look to the adults who were responsible for our care and to whom we depended totally for our safety and survival. The challenge of growing up is to learn to transfer some of these needs for assistance to ourselves. However, loss of access to the adult we depended upon when we were small was very alarming to all of us. As adults, we know this rationally to be true, but it is interesting to me how as adults we can forget that we are now the adults on whom our children legitimately depend for their experience of safety and well-being when they are feeling wobbled. Attachment Theory invites us to think about ourselves and our own reactions as they are influenced by our own past experiences and this awareness can increase our sensitivity to why so many of our most complex children really are struggling in their relationships today. 2. Attachment Theory helps us tie many diverse observations together in educational practices and in mental health A huge body of research has now demonstrated that early attachment histories are powerful predictors of educational and mental health outcomes. Children with a relatively secure attachment history with key carers (ie children who have parents who are responsive and helpful in attending to their physical and emotional needs) tend to be more prosocial and skilled in co-operative relationships, they tend to feel better about themselves and have better mental health and they tend to experience greater ease of learning in the classroom. Relative security of attachment clearly is an important variable. 3. Attachment Theory provides a developmental understanding for a wide variety of challenges seen in complex children that become labelled as if they are discrete issues. In work with complex children there is a very powerful drive to try to label behaviour that challenges adults as discrete psychiatric disorders: ASD, ADHD, ODD, OCD, Anxiety Disorder, Depressive disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder. This labelling tends to suggest separateness. Implicit is the belief that if we can give a cluster of symptoms a name, we may be able to find a useful discrete drug or 'treatment' that helps. Apart from the obvious concern about more and more children being prescribed medication because a certain label appears on file, this labelling of the child too often prevents adults from thinking about the relationship issues in which they are personally involved, and the way in which these difficulties are so often connected. 4. Attachment Theory encourages us to focus on relationships between children and their key carers not just on the child. As a psychologist and an educationalist, I am interested in understanding how different patterns of behaviour develop in the context of relationships. We know there can be genetic vulnerabilities to specific challenges, but more often than not, challenging behaviour, poor learning, or mental health issues develop when there has been a sensory processing issue, a disruption to the relationship or more critically a poor fit between the fundamental needs of a child, and the adult care and life opportuntiies that is and have been provided. We have very little control over a child's DNA or sensory processing (at least not yet!) and even as adults there are a lot of things we cannot controrl, but adults do have control over their own choices. So learning to fit our care provision to the needs of the child rather than expecting them to adapt to us, beyond their capabilities, is a process that can make a powerful difference to a wide variety of outcomes. 5. Attachment Theory provides a very clear and practical direction of travel for therapeutic and educational work it is important to remember that the distinction between secure and insecure is NOT a value judgement - a securely attached child or adult is not BETTER than an insecurely attached person. On the contrary, insecurity in attachment relationships can become a powerful driver for achievement in business for example. However, given that there is such a powerful body of evidence of the benefits of greater security in our key attachments, for both mental health and for educational outcomes, attachment theory can provide a very strong framework to guide the priorities of our policy making and practices. Thus any step that can be taken to encourage key adults to respect and respond appropriately to a child's attachment needs and thus increase their attachment security will be fundamentally important ones. Attachment Theory is an extremely powerful organising framework. In The I Matter Framework therefore, attachment relationships form one of the most important organising ideas in the frame, but attachment is not the only organising idea. I have found that by adding in ideas that are well-described or more elaborated in other psychological approaches, an even more powerful and practical framework can emerge. More on this in future blogs! How much have you read about Attachment Ideas? Let me know how they have influenced you, or what you would like to know more about! You can find out more about I Matter Courses Here References:
As a practising clinical psychologist and experienced teacher I have become increasingly concerned about the levels of stress I am observing amongst my education colleagues in schools. This last half term it seems that staff are more stressed than ever before and we are just at the beginning of the school year. Teachers are by and large an extremely conscientious and hardworking bunch. My concern is that the expectations of what class teachers and senior leaders should be able to achieve have grown and grown and grown, to beyond what is reasonable and healthy. The resulting imbalance between the demands of the role in hand and the capacities or resources that the class teachers and senior leaders available to them is seriously out of balance for too many. Symptoms of stress arise when there is an imbalance between demands and resources: As anyone who starts to study the content covered in the Level 1 I Matter Courses, will quickly come to appreciate, it is quite clear that excessive imbalance between demands and resources can lead to predictable physiological and psychological impact on children and on adults. One of the most important of these is that stressed adults and children all tend to become more reactive, and impatient and intolerant. This is of particular concern when those same stressed adults are interacting with highly reactive and stressed children and parents. There is some amazing practice in our schools with committed staff seeking to offer every child an opportunity for an education. Learning I Matter principles can really help a lot. However, there comes a point with too much top down pressure to deliver results that are out of line with what these same professionals, children and parents can realistically manage, then what I have seen is that the child can become the barrier to the teacher and school delivering the required results. The personal and professional impact of excessive demands In this content, the sheer level of stress I observe that is being experienced by too many schools in connection with the Ofsted process is an indicator of something that is seriously out of touch with the reality and needs of what is actually happening. I am appalled when I get to hear about yet another experienced head teacher or class teacher reaching total breaking point, but in the last months I have been hearing these stories more and more often. I think this is a result of an unfair and unreasonable amount of pressure on adults who deserve our support. Not only are some personal tragedies involved for highly committed individuals, but this relentless pressure on already committed adults has in my view very serious potential impact for our most vulnerable young people. What these young people need more than anything is time to develop within the context of supportive emotionally attuned relationships with adults who are not overwhelmed. Learning to relate to other people takes time and is very difficult to learn if the task demands are developmentally insensitive and the people being interacted with are pushed to breaking point. My greater concern is that these issues played out in the classroom with our young people have really long-term significant impact. When children who have significant delays in their social-emotional development are not given time to learn these skills because the curriculum is insensitive to the need, and when the teachers are being pushed and pushed to deliver literacy and numeracy results regardless of their pupils capacity and readiness for such formalised adult led learning, the result is not neutral. The consequence of such a mismatch will inevitably be felt in too many stressed and disengaged young people who are difficult to teach, and genuinely do not understand themselves or other people, having little or any motivation to learn. Symptoms of stress and the issue of diagnosis The symptoms of stress are observable in quite specific patterns of brain functioning characterised by much more immature long lasting functioning. The symptoms are those that commonly come to be described with psychiatric labels: anxiety, depression, ADHD, ASD, ODD. The labels do not adequately highlight what is really happening but it is serious because these same difficulties mean that that the given young person is likely to be much less employable and much more likely to have difficulties in their own adult relationships. I believe that this dynamic is a vital player in the rising concerns about child mental health, challenging behaviour, and crime statistics. Importantly these dynamics cannot be addressed through more and more pressure to deliver unrealistic educational results. What's the alternative? What is needed in my view is a collective step back and a reconsideration of what we are observing. What is needed is policies and practices that give much better appreciation of child development and the adult role in the developing brain. It needs us to wake up to the extent of the real difficulties experienced by so many children in our schools in their social-emotional development and to think hard about what really needs to happen. We as adults need to make some changes. This project wants to campaign on these issues so if you have ideas about how this could be achieved please contact us or join a course click here Copyright CBetoin2015 All Rights Reserved. The seeds of this conference started a long time ago from a sense of confusion and overwhelm experienced in response to the ever rising tide of need I have seen in day to day practice in health and education settings over my career of the last 20 years. How do you turn frustration into something constructive, how do you turn this sense of overwhelm and hopelessness into something that feels worth doing? The final trigger for this particular conference taking shape was a sense of exasperation about the NHS Future in Mind and 'transformation' process. Then the exasperation became an idea. So why not run a conference sharing what my colleagues and I really think? And we did it! The I Matter Project in partnership with the Centre for Adoption Support (CFAS) ran a half day conference in Lancaster on the 8th October 2015. It took us 2 1/2 weeks from idea to reality with lots of really good conversations, and a final diverse turn out of colleagues from education and health from both North Lancs and South Lakes for the event itself. I felt we were on track when just prior to the conference when I was sent a list by a local teacher describing the Y5/Y6 pupils in her local lancashire apparently privileged school. Of 34 pupils only 6 had uncomplicated home circumstances. The rest were facing a catalogue of challenges in their home lives involving child protection investigations, parent alcohol, and drug abuse, complex divorce cases. I guess this confirmed in black and white my concern about the scale of the challenges that I have been observing in day to day practice. The professional and personal challenge is how to respond. It is easy to grumble about what is not happening, and much more challenging to work out how to do something positive. This conference therefore set out to offer a critique of the current rhetoric on outcomes and evidence based practice in services to children and families with a view to offering a small glimpse of what a future 'really evidence based vision' might be. My belief is that we are failing to see the wood for the trees. The scale of the unmet need for children and families is in my view enormous but the biggest contributing factor in poor mental health and educational outcomes is not poor services per se but a collective failure to recognise the critical importance of child development, brain development and the adult role. I believe that the only way to really shift this is to give these issues much more value in the fabric of how we make policy and practice decisions. And for this a clear educational approach is needed and a clear strategy. Somehow if we are serious about helping children, we have to get to grips with the important role of the adult. We need to start to develop strong shared understandings and we need to think strategically This first annual conference was a satisfying start. Click here for one of the Conference Handouts. If you are interested in working with others to tackle these issues, please get in touch! Copyright CBetoin2015 All Rights Reserved. Are you someone who took part in face to face training pre-2013 and is wondering whether your training counts? Register quick to obtain a free online Level 1 account. For a time limited period only we are offering professionals who took part in face to face training, an opportunity to take part in an online Level 1 course at no extra cost. In order to achieve the Level 1 professionals will be required to work through the modules with a view to completion of the reflective exercises. This offer will be open to Christmas 2015. If you are interested in taking up this offer please email us and then Enrol Here The National Institute for Clinical Excellence have just released a draft document for consolation on attachment difficulties. This is a very welcome development! The consultation page (http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/indevelopment/GID-CGWAVE0675/consultation) contains the documents, background documents and instructions on how to comment. It is possible to register as a stakeholder but the consultation will close on the 13th July 2015. So, what do I think is missing from the draft document? It is a great document, and a big step forward. However, I don't want to see attachment difficulties ring fenced to adopted children and children in the care system, and I think there is insufficient recognition of the way in which living or working with a child who has had disturbed attachments can actively impact on and destabilise the unsuspecting adult. This understanding is vitally important, as lack of professional understanding of the critical role of the adult and the adults' needs is at the heart of many placement breakdowns for children. So I plan to share my views - what views have you got? The summer term is starting already and things are moving forward at a steady pace. Successes since the March newsletter: 1. The Intermediate class has been successfully trialled! 2. The Research Circle has been progressing well with different schools pursuing varied directions - as off -shoots to our exploration of the missing issue of child development and the question of how to engage parents. 3. There are now 3 schools who are members of the I Matter Project with exclusive access to the ever-growing range of I Matter practice tools. 4. The I Matter Project will have a new administrative base starting this week and a new administrator. 5. We have also just finished a very successful trial of an online group coaching tool. Watch this space! Do get in touch if you would like to take part in an online class! It's not too late for the summer term! |
Dr Cathy BetoinDr Cathy Betoin The I Matter Prof Blog:
How do we improve the educational and mental health outcomes of our children? Latest blogs
Categories
All
Archives
August 2019
Read these!My Newsletter
My Favourite sites |