Charity in UK holds conference for trauma training in schools

CATEGORY: SCHOOLS

Left: David Colley, PhD, Oxford Brookes University. Right: Laura Dennis, Education Outreach Lead, Mulberry Bush

Source: Oxford Mail
Read time: 2.2 minutes
 
This Happened
On June 20, 2024, the Mulberry Bush charity sponsored a one-day conference on ways to address childhood trauma in schools.
 
Who Did This?
Mulberry Bush, a 75-year-old charity based in Standlake, UK, conducts trainings and runs a residential school of about 20 students, ages 5 to 12, who have suffered some form of trauma. Laura Dennis, a former school teacher, is the Education Outreach Lead.
The university co-host was Oxford Brookes University, led by David Colley, PhD, in the School of Education. Colley has published several papers supportive of nurture groups in schools.
 
The Premise
This Research Conference goal was to disseminate the findings from several projects that have attempted to embed trauma and attachment training in UK schools.  

• The Mulberry Bush Nurturing Schools Project, led by Colley and  Dennis, started in 2021 to train staff at five primary schools. School staff received training in nurture, attachment, trauma and brain development, and emotion coaching. They also implemented a nurture group, which is a practice in many UK schools to treat troubled children with attachment principles.
•  The Beacon Project, based in the University of Sussex, piloted an effort in five schools. School staff received training in attachment and neuroscience of trauma. They were also trained in emotion coaching and ways to handle stress.
• A program based at the University of Oxford investigated the impact of training staff on attachment and trauma in over 300 schools across England.

 
Analysis
This conference is an example of how the trauma-informed approaches movement is not just popular in the US. It also has strong footholds in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Australia, and perhaps other countries.
The most well-developed of the programs in the conference is the nurture group model, which was developed in the 1970s and is now implemented in over 2,000 schools in the UK [1]. 

​A nurture group typically consists of about ten emotionally-troubled children who are pulled from mainstream classes for most of the day to a homelike classroom with two teachers. Rather than use punishment, the teachers provide an environment of emotional support. The premise is based on the belief that defiance, aggression, or withdrawal are due to an absence of supportive parenting in early childhood. The adjacent graphic, from a NurtureUK booklet, illustrates that the relationship with teachers is explicitly used to provide nurture experiences that were missed at home [1].

This model shares similarities with some American models of supporting troubled children, but there are no known nurture groups in the US.
 
NurtureUK, a charity for promoting the nurture group model, released a report in 2019 stating that more than 100 studies have found positive effects from nurture groups. The model was hailed as a tremendously successful program that likely pays for itself after just two years. A literature review in 2014, however, found only twelve outcomes studies [2] which had multiple major limitations. None of the studies were randomized. As such, no studies had outcomes measured with blind raters. While some behaviors improved, no studies found improvements in academic tests. There is no known financial analysis that shows that nurture groups pay for themselves.
Only one study had a follow-up that measured outcomes beyond the end of a school year. Researchers re-assessed children a mean of 2.7 years after the group ended, but they managed to follow only 12 of the 68 children who started the study. These children did not significantly improve on 16 of 20 domains that were tested [3].
 
The training for teachers in this model shares a common goal with the other trauma-informed approaches of instilling a culture in the belief of a misleading narrative of neuroscience that has been debunked. They embrace the toxic stress narrative that prolonged stress becomes toxic, and high levels of cortisol “can impact the developing brain and alter the structure and function of key brain areas” [1].


REFERENCES
[1] Nurture Groups (booklet) (2019). Published by NurtureUK, https://www.nurtureuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Nurture-Groups-Booklet-Dec-2019.pdf
[2] Naomi Katherine Hughes & Annette Schlösser (2014) The effectiveness of nurture groups: a systematic review, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 19:4, 386-409, DOI: 10.1080/13632752.2014.883729
 [3] O’Connor, T., and J. Colwell. 2002. The Effectiveness and Rationale of the ‘Nurture Group’ Approach to Helping Children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties Remain Within Mainstream Education. British Journal of Special Education 29 (2): 96–100.
 
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