SEN0407
Written evidence submitted by The Mulberry Bush
The Mulberry Bush is a charity supporting some of the UK’s most troubled and traumatised children, and the adults around them. We have a residential special school for children with extremely high levels of need (complex trauma, ACEs, SEND, and SEMH), and we use evidence-based knowledge and expertise to help these children experience safety, trust, accessible learning, and healthy relationships, often for the first time.
Our Outreach team packages up our knowledge of how to do this and makes it available to mainstream and other settings. We believe that not every child needs to come to The Mulberry Bush, but every child can benefit from the emotional containment, nurturing learning techniques, and practical skills on offer here.
We are submitting evidence for the inquiry because we recognise there is more and more SEMH/SEND need presenting in society and wish to offer our expertise and support. The development of one of our services alone (the Emotional and Social Curriculum) has led to over 100 organisations embedding the intervention into their provisions. We have increased the number of organisations we are working with and are developing this offering to reach even more.
We would be more than willing to provide oral evidence to the inquiry based on over 75 years doing this work and look forward to following the progress of this consultation.
In the short term, training would be our key recommendation, bringing awareness to staff about SEND needs, attachment & trauma, and nurture, and providing reflective supervisions to buffer staff resilience and capacity.
Short-term models that can be provided quickly could free up space and energy in the system as well as teachers’ capacity to reflect and continue to care while managing not only the children most in need but their entire classes.
We’ve noticed that teaching assistants are often put alongside the most challenging children when they have the least experience – training can help schools better understand what’s going on for the child, and reflective supervision gives TAs the opportunity to unpack what’s going on.
Our recommendation would be for government to seek specialist experienced providers like The Mulberry Bush and others who are already delivering successful training and interventions to schools and use these in the short term to stabilise the system while a long-term strategy is considered.
A note on funding the training: TAs are usually only paid to be at school while children are in the building. Time to think together and capacity to switch staff in and out comes from a level of overstaffing that might seem out of reach. But the reality is that schools and LEAs will save money in long term by funding interventions rather than highly specialist placements which as we all know can be incredibly expensive. Getting the right provision in earlier is also crucial - children who are struggling need to get to the right place quickly. The current system forces local authorities to evidence failure many times over in order to evidence the spend which leads them towards success. Specialist provisions come when there are no other options – spending money on early whole staff team / whole school interventions across entire authorities could ultimately provide a cost saving further into the future.
Essentially, we believe that adults in mainstream settings need an understanding of autonomic nervous system regulation – how to help yourself come back to feeling ok when things get difficult. Knowledge of what happens in your brain and body when you become stressed or dysregulated will enable adults to stay calm when faced with challenging behaviour and in time, help children to ‘co-regulate’ by using their own safe and caring approach to model both boundaries and nurture and bring them back into a calm and regulated state of being. This knowledge can be applied practically to things ranging from the amount of light and noise in a classroom, to a teacher’s tone of voice or initial responses to early signs of agitation, right through to 1:1 strategies with distressed children who have come from really challenging backgrounds. We believe tools like this can apply to everything from the classroom environment, a child’s sensory needs, role play, snack time, sitting at a table and many other mainstream school activities that not every child is well prepared for.
Simply put, children cannot learn while their ‘fight or flight’ system is being activated, and it can be triggered by a wide variety of things. Specialist providers can help to train schools to understand what these might be for individual children (and teachers!) while giving the space and guidance needed to develop their own practical solutions and roadmaps for what to do when faced with signs of distress.
Specific examples of training models
Emotional and Social Curriculum: A sequence of planned experiences which support children to practice and achieve proficiency in applied learning skills. The Curriculum focuses learning on the five core competencies of successful emotional development based on our research over 75 years. Schools purchase the Curriculum which is a physical resource and are supported by Mulberry Bush experts to take a group of children through many different playing, sensory, and communication activities which all improve the child’s readiness to learn.
Observation and reflective forums: An Outreach practitioner observes a child, group of children, or class for two hours, considering the child/ren’s relationship with peers, task, the environment, the adults, and their sensory needs.
A two-hour Reflective Forum is then offered – the first hour is reflection with the key adults around the child/ren, and the second hour is populating a “six stages of distress” grid, so that adults walk away with a practical action plan on how to de-escalate if a child is dysregulated.
If the Committee accepts that adults in the system need to have the skills and capacity to support children and young people with SEND needs, and must therefore be given the time and space and support themselves to achieve this, it stands to reason that this cannot be a quick-fix piece of tick box training, no matter how good the training is. Buy-in is needed at the very highest levels, otherwise teachers will continue to leave the profession and burn out just as more and more SEND/SEMH needs will be identified. The problem will not go away without investment, and possibly even regulation, at the highest level.
Has the Committee considered making staff education, reflective supervision and wellbeing part of the Ofsted process for schools? Equipping teachers and TAs with knowledge about nervous system regulation both for themselves and the children they support will be more effective if it forms part of Ofsted inspections and government is seen to take this issue seriously in the long term.
Intro to SEMH or de-escalation training has already given us significant positive anecdotal evidence from schools. Early career teachers would, we feel, particularly benefit from this sort of work. There is an important piece about considering how the work (or what the child is doing/showing us through their behaviour) makes us feel as practitioners/teachers. This piece often feels as though it is missing from mainstream schools, but it is a crucial part of the picture.
Nurture – children who have lacked early nurture or who need this for a bit longer (SEMH/SEND needs) should have nurture role-modelled in the classroom. This is more relational-based support and structure rather than shaming which can exacerbate things. If we made every classroom nurturing and every practitioner aware of the principles of nurture, the impact would likely be fewer exclusions (less need), more confident and better-resourced teaching staff, calmer classrooms, and more confident learners.
TA network and nurture networks. We offer six TA Network events a year, and three Nurture Networks a year that schools can send staff on. These are virtual calls – so no need to interrupt classroom time. Specific topics can be covered so the network provides CPD/training, networking and support opportunities and Reflective Space.
Specialist schools have long held a crucial role in meeting the social, emotional, and educational needs of children who have had difficult starts in life, and this level of need is unlikely to diminish soon, as we’ve seen. But specialist provisions also hold true potential and responsibility to share their knowledge of ‘what works’ and what helps with other mainstream provisions, parents, key workers, indeed anyone who has a stake in the wellbeing and education of a child.
Mainstream schools in particular get judged on their outcomes. That children are expected to make certain amounts of progress means that teachers are constantly “differentiating down” the curriculum, making the curriculum easier for children who can’t do it otherwise. At The Mulberry Bush we go right back and fill the gaps that have been missed. Children move through the school according to their level of emotional development and readiness to learn rather than age or attainment. We don’t move a child on until they’ve grasped the concepts they need in order to do so. By the time they reach specialist provision, many children have patchy knowledge because nobody has ever had the courage to make sure they can do the basics really solidly – regardless of SATS, phonics screening, value added scores, or a constant push forwards at the expense of children’s wellbeing and actual ability. We must meet them where they are.
Sir Martyn Oliver of Ofsted recently said that if we can get it right for the children most in need, those most marginalised and with the greatest struggles, we will get it right for everyone. The Mulberry Bush considers that there is no downside to making all schools more inclusive, nurturing, emotionally safe environments run by well-regulated and supported adults who can stay engaged, flexible, caring, and committed by ensuring that their own ability to stay with difficult emotions is well-resourced.
January 2025