Trauma-Informed Approach at St. Paul’s CE Primary School
At Farington Moss St. Paul’s CE Primary School, we are committed to creating a safe, supportive, and nurturing environment for every child. Our trauma-informed approaches ensure that staff understand the impact of adverse experiences and respond with empathy and care. We focus on building strong, trusting relationships, promoting emotional regulation, and providing strategies that help children feel secure and ready to learn. By embedding these principles into our daily practice, we aim to reduce barriers to learning and empower every child to thrive academically and emotionally.
The rationale – Why adopt a trauma-informed approach?
Trauma is recognised as a profound, global, public health burden. The pervasive and harmful impact of traumatic experiences on individuals, families and communities, and the inadvertent but widespread re-traumatisation of children and adults within existing services and systems, has made it essential to rethink ‘how we do business’.
Although many people who experience trauma will progress in life without any long-term negative impacts, far too many others will experience more profound difficulties and traumatic stress reactions. That said, research indicates that with appropriate support, people can overcome traumatic events. However, many individuals and families have gone – and continue to go – without appropriate support or interventions. Left unaddressed, trauma can prevent achieving good health and wellbeing.
Over the years, a tendency to focus on the presenting symptoms (e.g., violence or substance ‘abuse’), at the expense of addressing underlying issues, has led to huge human and economic costs to society.
Now more than ever, there is an urgent need to tackle the impact of trauma and focus on how public systems can support people to prevent, as well as recover from traumatic events.
Only by working together, across systems and with our communities, will we reduce the complex and interconnected social determinants and inequalities, which drive trauma.
Consequently, this Trauma-informed Strategy has been developed to support the ongoing dedication and development of Farington Moss St. Paul’s CE Primary School in becoming a trauma-informed school.
Definitions and Terminology
Trauma: results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experiences by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing (SAMHSA, 2014).
Trauma-informed care: The primary aim of trauma-informed care is to increase practitioners’ awareness of how trauma negatively impacts children and adults and reduce practices that might inadvertently re-traumatise clients. Trauma- informed care also aims to increase practitioners’ sensitivity so that users perceive them as trustworthy and feel safe to disclose traumatic experiences (EIF, 2022, p.22).
Our Trauma-Aware pledge
We will:
1. Attune to the possibility of trauma in the lives of everyone seeking support
2. Understand the needs and vulnerabilities of those impacted by trauma from diverse communities 3. Minimise re-traumatisation and promote healing
4. Understand and recognise coping strategies and the different ways/presentations of coping
5. Collaborate with those who access support to further develop our service
6. Recognise and promote dignity, respect and hope for those who access our service
7. Commit to a whole-service trauma-informed culture
8.Work towards applying the six principles of trauma-informed approach
Trauma Informed Principles
Safety: Throughout the organisation, staff and the people they serve, feel physically and psychologically safe; the physical setting is safe and interpersonal interactions promote a sense of safety. Understanding safety as defined by those served is high priority.
Trust and transparency: Organisational operations, procedures and decisions are conducted with transparency, with the goal of building and maintaining trust with clients and family members, among staff, and others involved in the organisation (e.g. providing timely, accurate and honest information about what is happening, what will happen next and why).
Peer support and self-help: Support people to connect with peer support and identify mutual self-help – vehicles for establishing safety, hope, collaboration, feeling valued, healing and recovery.
Collaboration: Understand power differences between staff and clients, and among organisational staff, working to ‘flatten the hierarchy’, share decision-making, work together in developing healing relationships and promote the approach that everyone has a role to play in a trauma-informed approach – one does not have to be a therapist to be therapeutic.
Empowerment, voice and choice: Promote recovery and choice. Recognise that every person’s experience of trauma is unique and requires an individualised approach. Avoid re-traumatisation - be conscious to prevent making people feel powerlessness. Support clients to make shared decisions and collaborate in setting goals and determining a plan to support them to heal and move forward. Staff are facilitators not controllers of recovery. Staff are also empowered to do their work, with adequate organisational support.
Cultural, historical and gender issues: Move past cultural stereotypes and biases (e.g. based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, religion, gender-identity etc.). Offer gender-responsive services and promote the healing value of cultural connections. Develop policies and procedures that are responsive to intersectionality, historical trauma and the needs of individuals served.
*Trauma-informed principles adapted from SAHMSA (2014)
Our pledge is for all staff working in Farington Moss St. Paul’s CE Primary School to work towards being trauma-informed, meaning that they are skilled and confident in applying a trauma-lens to their daily practice with children and families.
For all staff to be supported by policies, procedures and services that adopt a trauma-informed approach.
We will develop and invest in a learning culture for all staff and our communities within Farington Moss St. Paul’s CE Primary School to develop a trauma-informed service that realises the widespread impact of trauma, recognises the signs and symptoms of trauma, responds in a manner that is in-keeping with our knowledge and seeks to resist re-traumatisation.
We will support the workforce to implement trauma aware approaches in practice through whole service learning and development. This will involve reviewing policies and procedures, and developing tools, across the service that support the use of a trauma-lens and ensure the resources are readily accessible to practitioners. All policies will be reviewed as part of our Trauma-Informed Development Plan, at the next natural review point. Once reviewed, all relevant policies will include a statement referring to the Trauma-Informed Development Plan and will refer to the six Trauma-Informed Principles as part of the statement and policy process. Tools will include how trauma is considered through assessments, plans and supervision and our interactions with children and families within the wider multi-agency footprint.
We acknowledge that this is a long-term strategy and will undertake reviews of progress to critically assess the impact of our practice.
We will develop, grow and maintain a strong network of connections to ensure that Farington Moss St. Paul’s CE Primary School uses emerging research, evaluation and practice to be at the cutting-edge of trauma-informed approaches. This will see us continuing the work begun by the Lancashire Violence Reduction Network (LVRN) and the Trauma-Informed Lancashire Network.
Governors have a good understanding of the school’s strengths and areas for improvement. They support you well in the drive to help pupils reach higher standards.
