Are you a leader in education looking to improve the well being of your school staff?  Are you looking for ways to support a trauma informed approach in your school?

Are you a teacher, nurture practitioner or therapy practitioner in school looking for support with the demands of your role?

Or a part of senior management looking to support your own role and well being in a confidential space?

Why Supervision?

Working in education is a mentally, physically and spiritually demanding job.  High work loads, pressurised targets, accountability from many angles such as governing bodies, government, parents, society’s expectations of the role of schools, social media, the need to continually to adapt to change, juggling limited resources, school culture and the expectations this brings, the students or pupils themselves.

Working in a school you probably find that you are often the first place that children or their families turn to when faced with challenges or life events.  Every day you may be exposed to narrative related to their day to day challenges, adversity, distress and sometimes trauma.  Children will often express their difficulties through how they act and behave, so even when you aren’t hearing the details of what is happening you are impacted by their behaviour on an individual, class or school level.  You are probably used to spending time to support your pupils to be emotionally and physically present enough to learn.  Maybe you are part of a pastoral, nurture or safeguarding team with a specific role to support their emotional well-being and mental health.

So how do you process this, make sense of the thoughts and feelings arising from what you have seen, heard or been dealing with, so that you can continue to do your job effectively as well as remain emotional healthy? How do understand the dynamics of interactions with colleagues, pupils or parents so that you can work out a way for your pupils or staff to flourish?  How do you figure out a way forward with challenges?

Clearly this isn’t something that can be done alone or in isolation.

Donald Winnicott, paediatrician and psychoanalyst, spoke about the concept of a ‘good enough mother’; a caregiver who is able to contain and not overreact to what her child throws at her, literally or emotionally, and not sink under feelings of inadequacy and guilt when faced with a personal attack from a child temporarily unable to cope with the external world.   It is very hard to be ‘good enough’ unless supported, practically and emotionally, by the child’s other parent or another supportive adult.  And so a ‘nursing triad’ means the child can be metaphorically held through challenging times. (Hawkins and McMahon, 2020)

This is a useful analogy for the role of Supervision as part of an ‘educating triad’ for those who work in an educative role.  In other helping fields such as psychology, psychotherapy or social work the need to formalise this role, with someone who has appropriate experience and training, has long been recognised and integrated as both a professional and ethical requirement.

What is Supervision?

Unless you have worked in a role outside of education where Supportive Supervision is the norm or in areas of education where it is becoming more common, such as for those in a leadership role or those who work with safeguarding or special educational needs, you might associate supervision with monitoring or evaluating you and your work.  For example through inspections, lesson observations, performance management reviews.  Your experience may have been supportive, or you may have experienced it more as a form of surveillance or even as punitive, through the potential to be evaluated along the lines of not being ‘good enough’. An agenda of evaluation doesn’t sit easily with expressing vulnerability, such as to say you are overwhelmed with a particular challenge, class, pupil or workload, or simply to look together, without judgement, at what you could do differently to improve outcomes.

Processional and Supportive Supervision performs a different function and is principally characterised by joint and collaborative reflection in a containing professional relationship. The Supervisor:

• helps you in attending to those you educate or manage, to understand them and how best to support them
• facilitates reflection on the part you and your educative relationship plays in their learning and growth
• supports understanding of the influence of the wider context in which they exist on this, such as school culture, peer and family relationships, other school staff, society, education policy
• provides a secure and containing space so you can remain solid through the personal impact of your work

In this way Supervision supports the quality of your work, transforms your educative and professional relationships and promotes your continuing well being and development.

(See Hawkins and McMahon (2020) definition of Supervision).

The supervisor/ supervisee relationship is therefore key, and generally why an ongoing arrangement is beneficial (although there is a place for consultative supervision for specific issues).  In some fields it is often the case that someone will work with the same supervisor over a number of years, across roles and jobs for this reason.

The work done in supervision will depend on the both the needs of the supervisee and what the supervisor can bring.   For this reason it is useful to seek out a supervisor for individual supervision to match the two on a personal basis.

What I offer in Professional and Supportive Supervision

A space that is:

• reflective
• collaborative
• supportive
• non-judgemental
• non-evaluative
• consistently available
• independent of day to day working relationships 

A forum to:

• confidentially offload, gain support with, reflect on, and make sense of thoughts and feelings from your work, to both gain insight into and mitigate the personal impact
• reflect on and understand, and thereby provide the opportunity to enhance, working and teaching relationships with pupils, parents, staff, colleagues or the wider school and education system
• reflect on and inform your understanding, from a psychological and wider systemic perspective, the emotional challenges your pupils are facing, gaining insight into their presenting behaviour and emotional well being and thereby the opportunity to inform your teaching relationship
• collaboratively find a way forward with particular issues in your work or role
• celebrate what is working and going well

What it is not:

• a specialist resource to advise on teaching methods, classroom or school management or a replacement for professional mentoring specific to a given role
• a replacement for an educational psychologist to advise through observation on particular children, behaviour and management
• able to diagnose children (although reflection may lead to considering options)
• somewhere that has all the answers

About me

Since qualifying and registering with the BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) in 2011, I have provided counselling and psychotherapy to children, adults and groups.  I have been especially invested in working in schools, some on a regular basis to run a therapy service, others on a sessional basis with individual students and pupils. 

I have worked particularly with children and young people affected by trauma, ADHD, anxiety, and those who find it especially challenging to engage in learning, such as those who have been excluded or are at risk of exclusion.

This work has been informed through the development of an integrative therapeutic approach underpinned by Attachment theory, Psychodynamic and Systemic models, using a relational, creative and experiential approach adapted for the individual needs of each child and working with the wider context of their family and school.

I have found it an incredible privilege to work with many children, young people, their families, and their challenges.  I have been immensely heartened over this time to observe their determination to find a way forward for themselves to get the most from education and life and to be able to share a part of this journey with them.

With additional training in Supervision I have over 10 years experience in a Supervisory role, working with therapists and professionals across a variety of settings, as well as teaching Counselling and Psychotherapy in higher education.  I gained professional BACP accreditation in 2015.

References

Hawkins, P and McMahon, A (2020) Supervision in the Helping Professions, 5th edition. London: Open University Press