Trauma can have a significant impact on the stability of a child's development and can put additional pressures on the education staff working with them. Showing you how you can best support children who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, this guide is full of practical guidance on how you can adapt your teaching with this group. Covering a range of issues a child may have, such as foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, pathological demand avoidance, attachment difficulties and many more, this book provides the trauma-informed tools you need to care for these children and to give the best possible opportunities from their education. It also addresses the difference children may experience in learning, how they behave, how teachers can ensure home--school cooperation, and how teachers can act in a trauma-informed manner. Reviews: If we are serious about improving the educational and life chances of children who have experienced early life trauma, particularly care-experienced children, then The Trauma and Attachment Friendly Classroom should be essential reading for anyone and everyone working in education. What Rebecca Brooks, a teacher herself, does is take the reader through the necessary understanding of trauma and its effects and on to practical, easy-to-follow strategies that can be used and in some notable cases are being used within our schools. It is possible to educate children with trauma histories alongside their peers and enrich the experiences of the whole school community and Rebecca's book demonstrates how this can be achieved. - Sally Donovan, author of The Unofficial Guide to Adoptive Parenting The Trauma & Attachment Aware Classroom is an important and significant publication. Important because this is an area of pedagogy and classroom practise that the teaching profession needs to improve, and significant because of increasing concerns about the mental health of children and the rising levels of exclusion in schools. Every couple of pages the text provoked in me a memory of a child, a parent or a particular incident, and I was then forced to reflect, sometimes very uncomfortably, on how I could have handled things differently. Rebecca Brooks has pulled off a rare feat in writing an education book - The Trauma & Attachment Aware Classroom is both rich in research and intensely practical. There isn't a teacher in the land that will not be a better teacher for reading this book. - Jarlath O’Brien, Director of Schools and columnist for the Times Education Supplement |