Class techniques get great results (From The Oxford Times)

Class techniques get great results

6:00pm Friday 13th May 2011 in News By Liam Sloan

A PIONEERING education project in East Oxford has been credited with helping boost results of pupils experiencing problems at home.

For three years, The Mulberry Bush School in Standlake, Witney, which teaches some of the country’s most vulnerable and distressed children, has been sharing its methods with four East Oxford primary schools.

The Success project, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, has seen specialists from the 60-year-old residential school go into Comper Foundation Stage, Church Cowley, St James, St Francis and Our Lady’s primary schools to help teachers understand why youngsters may struggle to engage with lessons.

Using psychotherapy techniques and group discussions, teachers are asked to think about what may cause children to behave in a particular way, based on the theory that their actions are a way of communicating underlying problems.

At the end of the three year project, exclusions in the four schools had dropped, and 60 per of the targeted children showed improvement.

Dave Roberts, head of training for The Mulberry Bush School, said: “We have worked in this field for 60 years and have been routinely recognised as outstanding, and we want to share that with other schools.

“We want teachers to try to recognise children’s behaviour as a form of communication, and to try to understand what they are trying to communicate.

“It might be children who are regularly absent from school or who are struggling to engage with work.”

Last week, novelist Joanna Trollope visited the Standlake school, which since 1948 has taught children excluded from other schools and who have suffered neglect, abuse or trauma in their home lives.

Miss Trollope, a former teacher, said: “I have been very struck by the ideas behind the Mulberry Bush, which are completely different from mainstream education.

“The main thing is their view of a child’s behaviour as his or her language, and the need to read behaviour to see what the child is trying to say to you.

“Often they do not have the language because they come from an environment which is probably wholly physical and sometimes abusive.

“Teachers have to think: why are children doing this?”

She added: “This has been a successful initial project in East Oxford and the hope is that it can be built upon around the country.

“I think this work could rescue a lot of staff rooms.”

The Mulberry Bush School has now secured new funding for a project to share more of its practice with other schools in Oxford, Banbury and Swindon.