Case Study: Claire, Primary School Teacher

I completed my teacher training way back in the 1990s. I have absolutely no recollection of learning about trauma or care-experience at the time. Over the years, I will have had learners who were care experienced or who had experienced childhood trauma in my classes but I didn’t know that at the time.  

As a primary teacher now, there is compulsory child protection training and training for all teachers. Unfortunately, its usually online via a series of videos and there is little time to process and talk to others to embed the knowledge. As yet, there isn’t compulsory training in FASD and so teachers try to support children with the knowledge they have. This can lead to a lot of frustration on the part of the teacher, child and parent.  

Knowing about a child’s background, and difficulties, is just the beginning. 

Knowing about a child’s background, and difficulties, is just the beginning. I can think of a child I was working with who was frequently dysregulated. The other children and learning tasks were significant triggers for them. Looking back I can see how we, as adults, contributed to the difficulties this child and family had. Although, we did get to a place where this child was well supported by a support assistant, it took so long to get this support in place, that the child’s relationship with other children and adults suffered.  

A lot of the learning we did with this child was ‘on the job’ learning and it really challenged the knowledge we’d built up as teachers based on our previous experience and knowledge. If knowledge about trauma and its impact on the nervous system, and relationships, had been part of my initial training and I’d been supported to develop appropriate skills in my practice, we would have been in a much better position to support this child. 

The other thing to emphasise is how stressful it was as a teacher to support this child, in a class of 30 others, without any other adult support. We’d think we had predicted issues, prepared and set up a supportive environment, but something would happen in the playground or on the way to school that was out of our control and the child became dysregulated. We’d give time and support to de-escalate but it was never enough. There were so many little things, that would reignite the child’s dysregulation. It required so much extra energy and preparation on top of normal teaching practices, that we were exhausted.  

As well as teacher education, we need teacher support to be able to give learners the education they need in the classroom. Without adequate support, and by this I mean more adults to step in, to teach alongside, to be another person the children can turn to for support, we will see high rates of teacher burn out and compassion fatigue.  

I call on the government and local authorities, to provide continual teacher learning in trauma, care experience and FASD and to ensure that adequate support, in terms of teaching and support staff, is provided so that all learners with additional support needs can thrive in their education.