Rethinking Wellbeing of Neurodivergent Children in School with Charlotte MacDougall

you are very very welcome now well-being is a big topic in schools but it does have the same problem i feel as supporting mental health that when everything is calm we talk about well-being

and we talk about mental health

But when things go wrong, mental health and wellbeing are completely forgotten.

They don't link the situation to someone's low wellbeing and therefore support is not offered.

Yeah, absolutely right.

And I think there is a recognition of this in education because wellbeing seems to be at the forefront of inspection frameworks.

There's always policy documents around it.

There tends to be some sort of wellbeing lead in most schools, school counsellors, sensory rooms.

But I think the irony here is that well-being has become so much of an issue because the education system itself is really difficult and stressful to navigate for a lot of children, particularly neurodivergent children.

And many of the strategies that come to the fore when we are sort of addressing wellbeing tend to be well-meaning sticking plasters effectively.

They, you know, they will, you know, encourage someone to use the sensory room for half an hour, but forget that part of the reason that a child is dysregulated is because of the stress that's induced by this very high stakes outcome driven education system.

So when you said it was like putting sticking plasters, I literally, I'm envisioning Monty Python.

It is but a scratch.

But it is that well-being, it is, we have well-being leads, we have mental health leads, we have all this stuff, it's in the effort inspection frameworks.

But for me, the biggest indicator of well-being is, is attendance

exactly but i think there is this issue of um that's part of the issue that you know we look at attendance and if attendance is good then there's nothing to worry about um and the fact that we are really struggling with attendance now in school increasingly struggling with attendance more and more children are moving to a home education model um That suggests that there is an issue with well-being, but actually there is a significant minority of children who can still attend school.

They can still achieve very highly.

But the cost that they pay in order to keep turning up, keep jumping through all the academic hoops, is absolutely huge.

This is why we hear so often from parents that children go home and are very, very difficult to live with, have real struggles when they get home because the mask drops.

They can't sustain this level of hypervigilance consistently.

So they will put all of that effort into getting through the school day.

Then it falls apart at home very often.

So there are two sides to this.

Yes, there's the attendance issue that makes it very clear that there's a serious problem with some children's well-being.

But there's also this issue of children who are just pushing through and coping.