By Claire Cooper, Head of Student Services
At North Hertfordshire College, like so many education settings across the country, we’ve seen an increased number of more vulnerable students come through our doors. With the government’s Plan for Change detailing their mission to Break Down Barriers to Opportunity our role as an education institute has meant we have already had to address these issues, and make significant change to support our learners. As a result and To help us better support these students in achieving their academic goals, overcoming some of their early trauma, and to have the best possible life chances, we have been on a journey of training staff to be ‘trauma-informed’.
The term ‘trauma-informed’ means to understand how trauma in a child’s early life impacts their overall development. Examples of this early trauma includes abuse, neglect, bereavement, incarceration of a parent, and being placed in care. These are collectively known as ‘adverse childhood experiences,’ or ACEs, and they affect how our threat, soothing, and motivation systems develop. This in turn influences behaviour.
At North Hertfordshire College, we understand that developing a good understanding of our learners – their behaviours, their triggers, the de-escalation strategies they respond to, and how to help them recover – is key to providing excellent learning support. As trauma-informed practitioners, we understand how a student processes their trauma and how they best recover from triggers, including how a student likes to calm down, how they move on, and how they can return to learning mode.
What started off as a journey for curriculum and student support staff has evolved, with all North Hertfordshire College and Hart Learning + Development (our apprenticeship delivery arm) colleagues, including corporate services and administration teams, undertaking trauma-informed training in the autumn term of 2021 with Beyond Psychology. This rollout made us a trailblazer in the adoption of these processes in the further education sector, being amongst the earliest colleges to do so.
By involving colleagues from across our organisation in this learning journey, trauma-informed practice has extended beyond our classrooms. We bring the practice into the student application and enrolment process, HR procedures, and even interactions within teams, to ensure everyone is supported and to remove barriers that might otherwise prevent someone from achieving their potential.
Our trauma-informed practice journey is still ongoing, and we are keen to develop further so as to provide even more support to our young people. That being said, the evidence-based work our teams have undertaken has already had transformative results.
In a previous academic year, one of our Health and Social Care tutors had a class of 18 students of which five had experienced ACEs. Two had been out of mainstream education, two were care-experienced, and one suffered with severe mental health issues. At the beginning of that academic year, our tutor needed to spend a lot of time addressing challenging behaviour which was disrupting learning, such as ignoring instructions, attendance issues, and outbursts.
Becoming trauma-informed gave this tutor the strategies to support her students, such as the ‘roots and fruits’ activity to look at the behaviours and explore both the feelings behind the behaviours and the reasons causing them. She was also able to work directly with the students to understand the behaviours together, creating a risk reduction plan, breaking down triggers, understanding needs, and post-incident recovery.
By the end of the academic year, the tutor was reporting fewer difficult behaviour incidents and students were completing higher quality work. Four of the students even achieved their stretch grades.
North Hertfordshire College’s work in creating an inclusive and supportive learning environment supports the UK government’s mission to ‘break down barriers to opportunity’ – something the Association of Colleges (AOC) has noted requires heavy support from further education institutions like colleges to accomplish. That’s why the AOC is calling on the government to increase the funding allocated to colleges and other FE institutions, to help us continue this work and take it to even higher heights.
To find out more about the AOC’s Mission Accepted campaign, please visit: https://www.aoc.co.uk/news-campaigns-parliament/mission-accepted