It is well known that most living things can rebound from stressful, frightening, even life-threatening events. When a child is exposed over time to abusive and/or neglectful caregivers it is a different picture. The child will try not to think about the things that hurt, the dread or numbness that spreads out inside when faced with trauma and neglect. Over time, all emotional responses can be diminished and there is no rebounding without outside help. This was my experience; a sense of identity that assembled itself out of the disquiet abused children come to experience as normality. I was bullied at school because I seemed strange to others, was prone to avoidable accidents, swollen or broken fingers or toes, and stomach aches from which I had to curl up somewhere and for which no cause could be found. At boarding school, I became inclined to fugue states and developed a talent for faking them, even believing in them. Children who are unhappy and depressed tend to develop such symptoms as trauma expresses that way when there is no language to share feelings.
During my school years I was lost to myself and out of kilter with the world. Back then, in rural 1970’s Suffolk, there was no-one to help me join up the dots. Thankfully the picture forty years later has changed. Pastoral care for the health and emotional well-being of children at school has become widespread.
The 2018 NHS survey Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, notes that in 2004, 1 in 10 children aged 5-15 had a mental health disorder (either emotional, behavioural, hyperactive, or other). By 2017, this had risen to 1 in 9. When we include older children and look across all children and young people aged 5-19, 1 in 8 (12.8%) have at least one mental disorder. The survey notes the change is a result of an increase in emotional disorders (including anxiety and depression), which rose from 3.9% in 2004 to 5.8% for 5-15 year-olds in 2017.
It can be hard to assess when a child needs help as their distress may not present a clear set of symptoms which can aid others to see that the child needs help and perhaps requires professional help. Behaviours such as exaggerating minor symptoms, feeling unwell, faking illness, lying, or persistent unhappiness are harder to pin down.
On 17 July 2019, the BBC World Service featured in their series ‘People Fixing the World’ Highgate Primary School. Headmaster William Dean spoke about the school’s remarkable Pastoral Care Team which is made up of 17 professionals who provide emotional support for children, families and school Staff. He believes that for children to be successful, it is essential for them to be well cared for and to feel emotionally nurtured.
“Pastoral care underpins personal development and we know from experience that with outstanding pastoral care, students feel they belong and their self-esteem is able to flourish because they feel valued and cared for.”
The team of dedicated therapists work on-site and many are trainees on placement or recently qualified therapists who are still accruing hours. They work in partnership with school Staff and external professionals to deliver a unique therapeutic model of early intervention when a child is in need. From this holistic approach to working with children and families, in four years the therapeutic team have completed over 1500 hours of 1:1 counselling, psychotherapy, art therapy, musical therapy, play therapy and group sessions with the children. Crucially, Mr Dean says, no stigma is attached to requesting therapy from anyone at any level.
According to the Department of Education’s ‘Counselling in Schools: a blueprint for the future’, drawn up in 2016 (just four years’ ago): “Counselling fits within a whole school approach to mental health and wellbeing, covering issues such as improving wellbeing and resilience, raising awareness of mental health issues through the curriculum, reducing the stigma around mental health, effectiveness of the pastoral system and the role of leadership.”
The extraordinary work of the Children’s Society, a UK National Charity founded by Edward Rudolph in 1881, is dedicated to helping and supporting vulnerable children. Rudolf, a teacher and civil servant in South London, saw first-hand the effects of poverty on the lives of children. When two young boys failed to turn up for his Sunday school, he found them begging for food on the streets. Two of seven young children being brought up by a widowed mother. Theirs was not an isolated experience and Rudolf was moved to act. The Society’s guiding principals remain the same: to make childhood better, and that no child should feel alone. They work with children and young people (11,031 in 2017/2018) who feel scared, unloved and unable to cope.
Perhaps my own childhood would have taken a different course if the care and resources available today had been available in the ‘70s. Anger, sadness and unhappiness are part of life to one degree or another, whether it’s appropriate or inappropriate in any moment to have those feelings. Disturbance and normality aren’t defined by isolated behaviours that are a healthy and proper response to something. A child having a tantrum is not a symptom of disturbance as much as that they’re probably just growing up. However, a child may need help when there are lots of such moments, when they are severe and when they endure.
There is no doubt that children are subjected to forces that were unknown 30 odd years’ ago. A family environment doesn’t have to be traumatising or neglecting for a child to need some emotional help some time. The internal map we create of the world and our place in it as we grow up is the end result of countless thousands of experiences that form the components of our identity and our sense of self-esteem. Pastoral care is a brilliant thing, an essential part of a child’s education.