Just pleasantly floundering around.....

Some of you will remember the sinking of the Belgrano in 1982. Several of you might remember the Sun’s newspaper headline. It said, ‘Gotcha’. And a further number of you might remember something similar to my memory of the next day. I went to school and the Belgrano report was the hot topic. A number of us were outraged by the headline, others jeered with pleasure at the sentiment and several had no opinion. A discussion unfolded. It got a bit heated in places but stayed on topic. People listened to each others’ views. Those who initially held no view, joined in. People put their opinions forward, people made reference to facts they knew about the situation, people listened and we fine-tuned our thoughts on the matter. Some views remained unchanged but understanding had developed about why others held the views they did. Several people remained undecided or shy to put their opinion forward. We discussed it a little further over the following days. It was a while before the next hot...

I work in a pupil referral unit (PRU): a school for children who have been excluded from mainstream education. Nearly all of the children who attend have  quite extreme emotional and behavioural difficulties . The children are fragile, violent and full of fear. As staff we have to be endlessly caring, positive and make these children feel contained and loved. We have to uphold firm, fair, boundaries despite them often being a trigger for extreme behaviours as ‘kicking off’ usually gets them out of things they don't want to do in other places in their lives. We can never ‘lose our cool’ as that will undo any trust we might have built up and chances are we will be proving to the children what they hold as a deep-rooted belief about most adults: they cannot be trusted. We have to have a minute by minute awareness of what is going on in the room as the mood can change in seconds and a chair can suddenly be hurled through the air if we don’t get in quickly to prevent it. We cannot...