So why did I decide to become an Education Consultant? A restructure presented me with two options of either a role that I wasn’t passionate about, or an opportunity to take the plunge and work for myself (something that I have always secretly wanted to do). I took the latter and whilst this is scary, I know it was the right decision. This is not because I am arrogant, I just know that I am wired up to be successful at the things that I am fervent about, and if I am not passionate about a job, I will give it 100%, however I definitely won’t get 100% out of it. People have always commented on how committed I come across when delivering training, completing audits or even contributing to meetings, and this is because I do roles that genuinely inspire me, and that I truly believe in. I think that we all need to find roles that match our values as closely as possible if we want to feel true job satisfaction (but that's another blog!).

This got me thinking about all the roles I have done, and actually so many of the things that both professionally and personally have always interested me. I come from a medical background, with a Dad who was a psychiatrist and a Mum who was a paediatric nurse, not to mention the generations before that. Whilst I never really had the desire to become a nurse or a doctor, what I always did have was a fascination about the human body and how it works, particularly the brain. I have always been, perhaps concerningly so, intrigued by serial killers for example! I have read countless books and watched endless programmes about real life murderers and I always enjoy a good fiction crime thriller, again either when reading or when watching the TV. Loving ‘Prodigal Son’ at the moment (I know I'm a bit behind)! However, my interest isn’t the gore or the violence, and I am not drawn to the salacious facts. I have always wanted to know, for as long as I can remember, how someone can actually do these dreadful things, and what is it in their brain that makes them believe that it is acceptable and moreover a compulsion. 

Part of my psychology degree began to scratch this issue; however, I need to see the theory in practice. (Un)fortunately I haven’t had much opportunity to work with serial killers though, and they are thankfully quite a small percentage of the population. It is more realistic therefore to think about this the other way round – rather than focusing on what makes someone become a serial killer (which if I could solve would make me very rich!), we actually need to think about what things we may experience that may impact on our thought processes. I am by no means suggesting that negative experiences turn us into serial killers, however I genuinely do think that it is nurture over nature. I think it can be really difficult to separate the two, however I believe that this is more because nurture begins to impact pre-birth. I am also not really focussing on the extreme nature of someone who commits horrific crimes; what I am fascinated by is how our care providers, environment and experiences shape how we think, respond and manage our emotions. And in turn what this looks like in terms of the behaviours we demonstrate. 

I loved teaching and think with more time, experience and maturity I would have been a fairly good teacher, however what I quickly realised was that I was often frustrated in a very different way to my colleagues. I found on a daily basis that I felt inappropriately distracted by the majority of the children in my class, who were on task and working, because what I actually wanted to do was just focus on the children who were not! I was drawn to the children who just weren’t in the right place for learning. Don’t get me wrong this didn’t necessarily translate into me responding to their needs in the best way, and certainly didn’t mean that I didn’t shout and use behaviour management techniques that now make me cringe. In fact, I think there was some part of me that intrinsically knew that the way I reacted was unhelpful in a number of ways. However I had never been taught how to do anything better, and I didn’t understand the children well enough to even begin to comprehend the reasons behind their behaviour. 

I also didn’t understand enough about myself and how my emotions in any given moment would hugely affect how well I responded to the child in front of me. This is my biggest frustration with the teacher training I completed, and indeed some of what I still hear about today. There is not enough focus for me on Child Development and the biology of the brain, which can give us such a profound insight into what is going on for so many of our children. Furthermore, we still don’t pay enough attention to looking after the well-being of the adults providing care or education for these children. If our adults are not in a safe place, literally and emotionally, how on earth do we expect them to create safe places for our children? One positive from the pandemic is that we are beginning to talk about this more, which can only be a good thing. 

My subsequent careers working with young people who had offended, particularly those who had sexually harmed. Then considering the impact of neglect and abuse on children, and how this impact manifests itself in the classroom, all just further compounded my compulsion to get this knowledge I have, about the biology behind some of this behaviour out there, and certainly into classrooms and early years settings. If we have just a basic understanding around what early adversity can do to our brains, it can immediately make us think differently about the child we are working with. The minute we view the behaviour from a different perspective, or through a different lens, we can approach it differently. 

We all understand that if we adopted a dog from a rescue centre, its early life experiences will mean that it does not behave in the same way as a dog that we care for ourselves from being a new-born puppy. We don’t blame the dog for this because it is no way their fault and we are just curious about what the dog may have experienced to make it react as it does. Yet we sometimes struggle to apply this same logic to children and young people. If a child has grown up in an environment that is abusive, or they have just not experienced the nurture and care that we hope most children receive, then of course the way they have learnt to respond is different to children who have grown up in a secure and loving family. This again is through no fault of theirs and we can’t just wave a magic wand to make it all better. As I said in my last blog, I do love a quote and the one I have chosen this time made me really think about behaviour policies in school and what it is that they are actually trying to achieve. A word often associated with a ‘good’ behaviour policy is discipline:

Thinking about children we work with in an education context. If children have never been taught their times tables, we don’t just keep telling them that they should know their times tables and punish them because they don’t know them. We notice that they don’t know their timetables, we may wonder why and then we teach them. Then the next time we are doing something that relies on a child knowing their times tables we remind them of what they learnt before and help them apply that knowledge in this situation. For children who have experienced early adversity, developmental trauma or ACEs (all different ways of describing similar things), they may have never been taught the appropriate way to manage the emotion of fear for example. They may even have seen and learnt a really unhelpful way of dealing with this emotion. If they then demonstrate this by dealing with that fear by running from the classroom, should we then just tell the child that they should know how to deal with this emotion better? And even punish them every time they run off? I would say of course not; we should notice that they don’t have a better way to cope, wonder why and then teach and support the child to find a way to manage this emotion which is more helpful for both them and others around them. We should keep working with them on this until they feel confident about what they have learnt, and when we notice a situation where fear could be a factor, we should remind them about what they have learnt and help them to apply this knowledge in this context. 

If we understand that our brain is made up of neural pathways, and that these are developed by our experiences, we can begin to see how biology impacts on behaviour. Our neural pathways are developed through repetition, so if we have lots of positive interactions in our early years, such as lots of eye contact, touch, singing or rhymes, then these all help build helpful neural pathways that provide a strong foundation for future learning, behaviour and health. If we experience abuse or neglect, or an environment that causes toxic stress, then these basic structures can be poorly developed or damaged. As we get older our brain keeps the neural pathways that are most used and prunes away those that are underused. If the neural pathways that we are left with are not helpful in helping us to deal with our emotions, then we are left not understanding how we should react. We need someone to teach us, we need someone to support us to develop and build more helpful neural pathways, and then we need repetition to ensure that these pathways remain and get stronger.

So why did I become an Education Consultant and what can I actually do? I want to help anyone working with children to have the opportunity to learn more. I have obviously massively oversimplified the biology bit here, and there is so much information and research going on, that learning around this subject is definitely a journey not a destination. I can help people on that journey of learning, hopefully informally by making people think and approach things differently, and formally through training and support. It all starts however by appreciating that we don’t always know what is going on for the person or child in front of us, and that they may just need a bit of our kindness, curiosity, understanding and empathy.