TRAUMA-INFORMED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

With Children & Young People (CYP) engaging with their school for six-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week over thirty-nine weeks of the year…if properly cultured and strategically mobilised, schools can be positioned for far more leverage in outcomes for CYP.

What is tile?

The tile programme - geared towards mainstream, specialist and alternative education providers - looks to engage with schools in establishing their own, as a trauma-informed and attachment-based learning environment.

Increasingly, services and organisations that engage children & young people (CYP) in general are being required to show a capacity for contextual understanding and practice; reflective of the complexity of modern young lives. A frontier of which education providers are at the forefront.

Nonetheless, it remains that cumulatively, Children and Young People engage with school for at least six hours a day, five days a week across thirty-nine weeks of the year from as early as the age of three through to eighteen.

The tile design of a trauma-informed and attachment-based approach to education is about shifting from a ‘power-over’ approach, characterised by punishment and rewards, judgments about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour and the emphasis on compliance instead of connection and compassion – historically very prevalent in schools – to a more curious, compassionate way of viewing behaviour. We encourage participants to perceive behaviour as communication of unmet needs, feelings, or the symptoms of trauma. It sounds simple, but once a child, parent, teacher or other adult is triggered by the other’s behaviour into the survival part of the brain, the higher parts of the brain go offline, and the child or adult loses the capacity for perspective.