Movement, Regulation, and Belonging: Shifting Behaviour Management from Penalisation to Partnership with Neil Moggan

Episode Description

Can physical activity become a core vehicle for trauma recovery, emotional regulation, and deep belonging in our schools? Far too often, educational environments inadvertently re-traumatise children through behaviour management policies focused purely on sanctions and isolation. In this episode of Trauma Informed Conversations, host Jessica Parker is joined by former Director of Sport and founder of the Rise Up program, Neil Moggan. 

Driven by a striking discovery regarding community health inequalities and a noticeable decline in children's mental health, Neil shares his journey toward adopting a trauma-informed lens that completely transformed behavioural outcomes across secondary and special school settings. Together, Jessica and Neil dive into the practicalities of his 'Recover' framework and the unique 'RISE' acronym designed to guide emotional regulation through intentional, care-wrapped movement. 

They explore how moving away from rigid behaviourist systems to find a balance between nurture and structure can successfully prevent exclusions, shrink behaviour boundaries, and heal the ruptures that block a young person's ability to learn. Whether you are a PE specialist, a classroom teacher, or an educational leader, this conversation offers a powerful testament to the impact of knowing a child's story, using sensory strategies for core regulation, and building a lifelong self-care toolkit. 

Key Takeaways

• From Disparities to Action: How a staggering 13-year life expectancy gap outside an inner-city school fueled Neil's transition from a standard sports curriculum to early intervention wellbeing programmes. 
• The 95% Drop in Send-Outs: The rapid transformation that occurs when a department switches from rigid discipline to psychological safety, instantly lowering classroom removals. 
• Decoding the RISE Acronym: A practical look at Repeaters, Inclusive teams, Stress busters, and Energisers as intentional tools to widen a student’s window of tolerance. 
• Slashing Physical Restraints: A moving case study from a specialist school where proactive movement strategies and emotional self-awareness reduced physical interventions from 50 down to 10. 
• The Lifelong Self-Care Toolkit: Breaking the mental health stigma and utilising a "happiness chemical menu" to give young people emotional intelligence skills that outlast their school years. 
• Balancing Nurture and Structure: Addressing the common misconception that trauma-informed practice is a "soft touch" by proving that clear boundaries and high expectations are actually expressions of care.

Guest Profile

Neil Moggan is an award-winning educator, author, and the Founding Director of Future Action, an organisation dedicated to transforming children’s life chances through trauma-informed mental wellbeing strategies. Over a 19-year career in physical education, Neil served as a Director of Sport and a Health and RSHE lead at an inner-city secondary school in Norwich. After qualifying as a Trauma-Informed Schools UK (TISUK) practitioner, Neil road-tested a relational and movement-based approach that radically lowered his department's student removals by 95% in a single term, while dramatically boosting student grades and attendance. This transformative success became the foundation for his acclaimed 'Recover Roadmap' and the 'RISE Up' Early Intervention Programme. Recognising the modern youth mental health crisis, Neil's curriculum has empowered hundreds of primary, secondary, and special schools globally to build sustainable cultures of care. He is also the author of the Amazon-bestselling book, Time to RISE Up: Supporting Students’ Mental Health in Schools, published by PE Scholar.

Links & Resources

• Download the free Trauma Informed Frontline Educator Scorecard mentioned in this episode from here. 
• Connect with Neil Moggan and explore his training programmes at Future Action.
• Find Neil's bestselling book: Time to RISE Up: Supporting Students’ Mental Health in Schools.
• To learn more about trauma-informed educational programmes or to collaborate on school case studies, visit the Trauma Informed Consultancy Services (TICS) website. 

Subscribe to Trauma Informed Conversations for more honest discussions about trauma, recovery, and building systems rooted in care and humanity.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome to Trauma Informed Conversations, the podcast about trauma, healing, and hope. Well, hello everyone. I'm here today with the wonderful Neil, having been quite inspired by a recent uh LinkedIn post that I saw on the um active Surrey page. Neil, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Hi Jessica, thank you so much for having us, and hello to all our listeners. It's great to be here with you today.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Fantastic. So I came across this yeah, not so little project that you've been working on, Neil, of Rise Up. But before we kind of get into Rise Up, I don't know whether you want to tell our lovely listeners a little bit more about yourself and the work that you do.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Yeah, so um, hello everyone. My name's Neil Moggan. I taught PE for 19 years. Um, my ambition was to become a director of sport, um, and I got that chance at an inner city secondary school in Norwich. And around 2015, I um found out that there was a 13-year life expectancy difference depending on what side the main road children were born on outside our school. And at first I got really angry. How is that fair? And one of the 10th richest economies in the world, um, but then it really fueled our work around how do we transform children's life chances and try and bridge that gap. Um, so we started off looking at reducing health inequalities through um uh early intervention obesity programs, and then we got into early intervention mental well-being programs because I had three year year seven girls come to my dance lesson late, struggling with anxiety, struggling with confidence, struggling with connection, and I felt really hopeless and helpless. I had no strategies on how to help them and cope with them. So we started to do some work in that space and we got some awards for that work. Um, then we started looking at financial literacy to try and give children resources to create um kind of better outcomes for their family because uh I was looking at Swarbrick's eight dimensions of well-being at the time and looking at what influences kind of um life life life outcomes. Yeah, and then my amazing supportive head teacher left the school. He went to a different different school, trust changed, um, and we went to a real behaviorist approach post-lockdown. And I had my three best members of staff off on long-term maternity and paternity leave, which was fantastic. Yeah, but we know how hard it is to maintain high standards, and for the first time in my teaching career, I was really struggling with relationships and behaviour, even though I never cared more about these children and their families. Um, however good our well-being programs were, they just weren't working, and that's where I found trauma-informed practice. So I did the TISUK level five practitioner diploma, and pretty much within two weeks it transformed our behaviour outcomes. We reduced send outs by 95% in one term um through creating real positive meeting, greet, psychological safety, really making children feel welcome. Um, and uh our attendance went up by five percent for our for our our most highest knee children. Their predicted grades went up two point two and a half grades in a term. Wow, wow, this is this is amazing. But as a whole school, yeah, as a whole school, we were still re-traumatising children on a daily basis with our kind of behaviour management policy policies, which were were quite frankly inadequate. And so I left my school December 2022. And um, since then we've worked with about 300 schools across the world um helping them create their own bespoke programs based around their own context because nothing used to annoy me more than people coming into my school telling me how to teach my children. Oh they wouldn't last 10 minutes in my school. Um, and uh, and so we don't patronise teachers, we very much work in partnership um around outstanding relationships, movement for regulation and belonging, play wrapped in care for those children struggling with rage, grief, and shame, teacher agency and child agency, and then building those self-care toolkits to build children's emotional intelligence once they've uh once they're feeling safe and supported and able to kind of access their prefrontal cortex. So kind of that's the work we do. We're really proud of what we do, and we're we're really privileged to do what we do, and we work with amazing educators around the world to help them kind of empower, empower their own children and support their own children.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Wow, I'm just staggered. I mean, 13-year age difference from one side of the road to another. I mean, I think you know that really stood out for me, and I I kind of equally, as you said it, I also put up that anger that I think reminds us about why we work in the space that we work in, Neil, really, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 4:38

100%. Like when I first found out I was so frustrated because you've worked in schools, you know how children get under our skin and like you worry about them at night, you care deeply, you think you try and tweak and change what you're delivering to get the best out of them. And I had a a real cool group of girls kind of post-lockdown that I was really, really worried about, and this was what this program was designed for initially. But because of the way teachers put their own kind of spin on it, we've been able to take it down to key stage one in primary schools, to special schools, to APs, like it's been incredible. And that that's not down to me, that's down to the the brilliant educators that we work with across across the country and across the world.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

All right, you know what? It's incredible to really just think about, you know, sometimes, you know, that just a chance encounter of you kind of, you know, maybe just seeing that stat, you know, perhaps almost reflecting, you know, where would we be now almost without the pandemic in that kind of way, because it really did, you know, I think help to sort of open up so many more opportunities and almost give us that, you know, extra motivation that probably you know needed to kind of um shake things up a little bit in education and as you say, kind of move away from that behaviorist um approach that many of our schools, mine included, um, were very much kind of relying on at that point.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Yeah, definitely. I think it was a real silver lining of of of lockdown was that awareness around um around the decline of children's mental health. Now, um, I used to be ahead of year back in 2000 and and and uh six, seven, and we used to have about 160 children in my year group, and historically we'd have three children that were struggling with mental health, and they all were girls at the time. Um, and fast forward post-lockdown, all of a sudden we got 30 children, and it was like six to nine children were struggling with their mental health kind of by 2022, and there's been a huge decline in children's mental health that um unfortunately I've had a front row seat to, and that fuels kind of a lot of the passion for the work that we do.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Yeah, it really, really does. Now, the thing that unites us, Neil, is our passion for trauma reform practice. I'm not going to lie, okay, the last time that I did probably much around sport myself was probably in about year 11. So, can you teach me a little bit, please, about movement, about sport, about you know, again, like rise up, you know, in terms of that vehicle for kind of getting people out, getting them moving, almost kind of supporting belonging and relationships and nurturing through sport. How does that work?

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Yeah, so um I created this recover framework, which was a seven-step model to teach colleagues within my department, kind of around the ACES study, the evidence base behind it, and then the eight protective factors around emotionally available adults. And then kind of the next kind of phase of that, the steps three, four, and five is around right, how do we be intentional about creating psychological safety? Those positive meets and greets, the cues of safety for our face-voice body, our power of relationships, knowing our children, knowing their stories and what they need. So that's kind of step three, and then step four is about that movement for regulation and belonging, and that's where RISE comes into it. So RISE is an acronym standing for repeaters, inclusive teams, dressbusters, and energizers. Repeaters are repeatable activities like running, walking, swimming, deep breathing in yoga has the same impact. And what we're trying to do is create this own two-style deep breathing that calms the amygdala, widens the window of tolerance, and accesses a prefrontal cortex. And B teachers use that they use these types of activities all the time in their P lessons, and it's just about being really intentional about it, um, so that we're not just doing it for kind of health benefits, it's around right, let's use it for regulation and belonging. Um, so that's the R. The I is around inclusive teams, and that's around this feeling of connection, this feeling of love, um, connection with others away from a screen. Um, and that can be traditional team games or non-traditional team games. So it can be your footballs, your netballs, your cricket, your rugby, or it can be like outdoor adventure activities, it can be stuff like we've had real success with children with autism teaching their favourite computer games physically to their classmates. So um it can be it can be so much, and it can go wider than PE, it can be school shows, your dance productions, yeah, uh Warhammer Club, your chess club, your mindful journaling club. It like we obviously we're we're we're looking at for a PE lens, but it can go so much wider, and that's developing that sense of belonging in our schools. Then we have stress busters. Stress busters are very much like repeaters in terms of that deep heavy work when we're exerting a force against a resistance in a controlled, predictable way, wrapped in care, again, calming the amygdala, one the window of tolerance and accessing the prefrontal cortex. So that's stuff like punching a punch bag, wrapped in care. That's stuff like weight training, it's press-ups, it's pushing against the floor in yoga for our our introverts. There's so many different ways schools can do that, and this is very much about bringing our high-energy children. Sometimes uh very much in my classes, my sporty boys bring them down into their window tolerance, and then energizers is about bringing our children up into their window of tolerance. So, this is my this was in my classes. Traditionally, my my my girls struggling with low mood, how do I bring them up? And that was very much through dance, it was aerobic activities that stimulated that that kind of uh dopamine and serotonin to to bring them up into their window tolerance. So it's stuff like skipping, stuff like circuit training, that kind of stuff, but always with child agency involved and always wrapped in care. All of these activities are wrapped in care with the relationships that are kind of fundamental to it. So um we help we help schools kind of use those different activities in different ways. It can be in PE, it can be as an intervention, it can be as a rise up sports sanctuary, it can be as movement breaks, it can be as active form times, it can be um kind of interform competitions. There's so many different ways that schools can weave that into their school day depending on their context, because every school is so different and every school needs that support.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

I love that. So I was wrong, it's not just PE, is it? It's literally any subject where you can incorporate movement. We could use this staff, you know, this whole set of strategies.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

100%. Yeah, it that's like um, I think that case study that you saw around Ravenscott Jr., they were very much using it as kind of movement breaks within lessons. So we we worked with all their staff around empowering them at in that that approach, but they also had a core group of 24 children that um kind of ADHD children that kind of needed that little bit extra and were taught different regulation strategies wrapped in care again. Gary did a brilliant job supporting them, um, fantastic leadership from Amy Wells, and then kind of then children had that chance to kind of show their ticket, go off and do uh that that extra movement when they when they were feeling heightened and needed those opportunities to regulate. Um, and they've created a fantastic school culture around that and kind of reap the rewards from it.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

That's really interesting, really, really interesting. So I guess what I'm hearing is you know, we are supporting with regulation, aren't we? We are, you know, guiding young people to be able to initially co-regulate with us as the adults leading the programs, but then equally, you know, almost having these skills for life as well, so that they can think back to, you know, actually everything that you taught them and you know, kind of really understanding where they might be, you know, on the window of tolerance and which direction they want to be moving in.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

100%. Yeah, but that that feeling of psychological safety and co-regulation is so, so key. And then once we've got them in their prefrontal cortex starting to develop their emotional intelligence around right, what strategies do I need to help me regulate? And I've done a lot of work on myself, and I know that when I'm dysregulated, I need to get in the garage and do my weight training and go for a run and a walk so I don't take out on my two young children, my wife. And I think the more we can help our children understand what they need, then the better it can be, and also what teachers understand and what their young people need. So we work what one of my proudest case studies is is a school called Buell Park Specialist Academy. It's a boys SMH residential school in Great Yarmouth. And um, Anita Fidesz Capeda has done a brilliant job. Initially, she started with these year five boys in their first year together. They had 50 physical holds, 50 physical interventions. She's done some amazing work around when they're in their prefrontal cortex, identifying what free strategies they need the most in terms of movement, and it was combined with a thrive approach as well. So they had kind of uh some some running machines, uh rowing machines at the back of the class, they had a little bit of weights. They also had a thrive room with a trampette, and children had those these free strategies, and then they'd show their card, or the teacher would say, Maybe you need to go off with your TA and do some movement. And um, in year six, their physical holds were 38, and year seven went down to 10. And um, just when you think about the shame of being physically restrained in front of your classmates to take it from 50 to 10 was just awesome, and Anita's done amazing work there, and then there was we I went in to to do some work, kind of creating that capturing that that evidence, and there was a year eight boy there who kind of four months before had been in the back of the police car in handcuffs restrained from from self-harm. Um, and then just four months later, he's talking about when I'm dysregulated, I know that I I need football, and then I need some time to calm down after that football. And sometimes if I go too far, I just need to be left alone. But just that self-awareness from a 13-year-old boy who suffered some of the most horrendous aces, to have that clarity around what he needed and the teacher knowing what he needed, that that's huge, and that's the work. That's the work that we're really proud of. That's the work that we're trying to do with as many schools as we can to show how movement can be used as a way to support our young people, to to kind of reduce the number of behaviour incidences that we get in school, reduce the knock-on impact of that in terms of exclusions and that pipeline to prison, um, and and just really try and create healthier, happier schools where young people can flourish and thrive and to take the pressure off our teachers so they don't have to have those restorative conversations, they don't have to have all those sanctions afterwards, and to try and make families feel calmer and safer as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So, I guess what I'm hearing, Neil, is he literally has those strategies now for the rest of his life, doesn't he? It's not, you know, what I was thinking at the beginning of our conversation that he's just having a nicer time with his PE teacher. It's so much more meaningful than that, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah, no, definitely. And what we what we we kind of have five pillars to our approach. The the first is non-negotiable, is quality, outstanding relationships. That is that is fundamental what rise up is about. Then we have the movement for regulation and belonging, um, and children finding the activities that work for them. Like you don't have to do the whole program, it's about what works for this group of children and this group of children. Then we've got playwrapting care for those children struggling with rage, grief, and shame, looking at the work of Jack Panksp and uh shifting emotional states and Bruce Perry's neurosequential model. Um, and then we've got that teacher agency and child agency that's so important. Um, no one likes having a program done to them, it's very much a partnership and teachers putting their twist on it, and also children having agency over what those activities are. And then once we've got that feeling of psychological safety, really building those the the child's emotional intelligence so that when they leave our care, they've got strategies to go to to try and reduce the pressure on downstream services in this country. We know we've got a million children, over a million children either accessing mental health support services or waiting to access mental health support services. And what we're trying to do is keep children right at the top of their mental well-being. We're not proclaiming to be specialists in trauma, that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to equip children and equip staff, like frontline educators, with the strategies to create an environment that aids recovery rather than adds to the trauma. Um, and certainly I've been in schools that that that do both, um, and we're very much about trying to equip educators and then children with that self-care toolkit.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Absolutely. No, that's phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. And I mean, I think you know, having worked in schools for many years ourselves, you know, we know that time is often something, you know, we also don't we haven't got time for that, the curriculum's too full for that. You know, what would you kind of say, you know, in terms of you know how important it is, I guess, to kind of make space for maybe things like movement breaks, or it's kind of increasingly sounding more to me like every subject teacher, every member of school staff could be making use of some of this?

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Yeah, 100%. I don't think it's an either-or question. I think it is to get great outcomes, you need to make sure your child's in a good place, ready to learn. Um, and that comes from psychological safety, that comes from regulation, that comes from optimizing those conditions for children to thrive. And uh what I found in my own classes was right, I could go really heavy on the curriculum, but I'm not getting the outcomes because these children are deeply unhappy. They don't feel safe, they don't feel welcome, they don't feel like they can make mistakes without judgment. And when I invested in those relationships, I could spend a lot of time in that space, and I did, but it saved me a hell of a lot of time with lack of restorative conversations, attentions, phone calls home. I was a lot happier. Myself as a teacher, I fell back in love with teaching again. And um it is about right, let's choose where you want to invest your time. Do you want to invest it up front and get the reap the outcomes, reap the benefits, or do you want to invest it at the back end, managing um challenging behaviors um and having really unhealthy conversations? So I don't see it as an either-or. I'm I see it as right, invest in that holistic development of the child, and then that will lead to the outcomes. And I wish Ofsted measured the teachers that really invested in those relationships that really provided those protective factors because I think we would see a transformation now in my in my school, in my department, we reduce send-outs by 95% in a turn. Now, can you imagine what that would look like across the country if uh across the school we reduce send outs by 95%? What would happen to the exclusion rates? We've got record exclusions, we've got record unauthorized absence. What would happen to those figures if we invested in our children, shrunk the curriculum, and really prioritised what our children need in the 21st century rather than a system that was designed for the industrial revolution and developing a workforce where we've got AI, we've got all these things going on at the moment. What do these these children need to help them fly thrive and flourish going forward?

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Absolutely. Or actually, is it more about life skills and the age of AI? Or I'll tell you one thing that's jumping out for me, Neil, actually, and I've been thinking about it, you know, right the way through our conversation so far, is how a program like yours and all the goodness that you know a school could get from that, it's really supporting children to actually have more confidence in themselves. And I'm thinking about all that preventative work around, you know, maybe enhancing self-esteem, you know, you're mastering skills, aren't you? You're completing challenges, learning something new. Like the shift that that could have in terms of preventing that sort of domino effect, you know, what you were saying before about you know, that the kind of school-to-prison pipeline and all that area that kind of I think pains most of us to kind of even think about, really.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Yeah, that's the self-care toolkit has kind of got nine steps to it. And the first one is about breaking the stigma around talking about mental health. And I talk about kind of my own experiences there. We use celebrities and role models and sports heroes there to break that stigma because it's okay to not be okay, and that will depend on your situation, your circumstances. And then we start to like try to identify those that are struggling as early as possible. We use the mental health continuum, but a really cool, cool trick, or not to trick a cool tool where you can anonymously see where each child in your class is within 30 seconds, um, from thriving to okay to starting to struggle, struggling and ill. And like I was saying, well, I used to do that a lot with my classes locked the post-lockdown, and we would see right three children walking in the class, clearly struggling with their mental health. But we do that, and it became six, it became nine. And you were like, Wow, that this this the scale of this problem is a lot bigger than we we think, and also gives you a chance to get them early intervention, get them, get them support from safeguarding teams, had some real success with that. Then it moves on to self-awareness through body scanning and journaling. We saw like this this program is designed for teenage girls. With it, with the girls that I worked with, we found that they really liked journaling, but we found that they really didn't like body scanning. And I don't know whether it's because they had a male PE teacher that was doing it, and the room wasn't particularly nice. But I tried it with my year eight sporty boys, and they loved the body scan and they hated journaling. And it really wasn't designed for them, but the Of MFL came up to me, Steph Steph Benny. She came up to me. What did you do with your boys? I was like, Oh no, here we go. Many of the teacher resonate with that. She was like, That is the best they've ever learned. They were so on it, they were so engaged. And it was what we'd done is we'd done a real kind of vigorous circuit training session where children had picked what stations had done. Then we'd done um stretching for stretching for sport for sport, which was basically yoga, and we were doing a scan, and we were doing a lot around the deep breathing, three, four, five breathing to regulate the iniquality access to the prefrontal cortex. And they went off calm and composed to their their MFL lesson. And they they absolutely flourish. And they they begged me every week, can we do the breathing exercise? And I was like, Really? I thought you'd want to be like playing football or playing rugby. But but when you think about it, our our particularly our sporty boys are very much bouncing off each other, taking the Mickey out of each other all the time. There's a lot of judgment, a lot of comparison, and actually it was just a safe space to be still, to breathe, to reflect. And um, they really valued that space, and that that was something unintentional that we weren't it wasn't designed for, but that's something that we learned along the way. So that's step three. Step four and five is all around developing that mental fitness pyramid. So this is where the program started, probably back in 2016, 2017, and we use Marcus Rashford, the real power of story here, around kind of I don't know how many heroes in life, but what he did around food poverty, children's food poverty, children's literacy over lockdown was incredible. And despite that, he's still taking a huge amounts of criticism, racially abused for missing a penalty for England, criticized in the media, lazy, money grabbing for protecting his family's financial future. So horrendous abuse in the media. And I say to children, someone like Marcus, with all he's done for children, takes that level of criticism. All of us need to kind of build that foundation, and we we really try and build children's holistic self-confidence through what they get at school, what are their passion activities, what do they love to do, what um are they the best characteristics, are they kind, are they caring, are they funny? What um what are the different roles they play in life? They're not just a student at school, they're a son, they're a daughter, they're sisters, they're cousins, um, all those different aspects because far too many children leave our education system feeling like failures when they're not. They've got no one's better at being Jessica Parker than than you are, no one's better at being Neil Mogan than being Stan than Stan. Like that's yeah, everybody, everybody is unique, everybody's got value, everybody can bring something different to the to the world and add value in that way. And it's about children seeing that, and then we start to look at self-kindness and about right in this age of comparison with social media, doesn't just have to be about that person's the best, it can be that person's awesome, but this person's also awesome, and and and developing that, and then we start to use worries as a positive to reduce anxiety by creating a plan, and then we start to raise aspirations for the future by looking at developing children's kind of aspects of their ricka guy. So it's not always easy for for children to do that, but just to try and weave in that that extra motivation and having a goal to work towards and taking small steps towards that. Um, so that's kind of step five, and then we get into healthy habits around the power of sleep, exercise, nutrition, hydration, mindfulness, balance, and social media usage. And again, in my ECT year, I went to visit a doctor because I'd snap my cruise shirt, I'd stop seeing my friends, I'd split up from a girlfriend, I was drinking too much, I was eating rubbish, I wasn't sleeping too much, I was working loads. Now, most can seven conditions. No wonder I was struggling with my mental health and struggling with mental illness. If we help children understand, right, actually, if you sleep well, if you exercise, if you connect with your friends, if you've got trusted relationships, if you're drinking lots of water, you're eating healthy, the chances are you're going to be higher up on that mental well-being kind of scale.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

Well, of course.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Um protect yourself. And um, and then from there we look at accessing the daily dose of happiness chemicals. So we've got a self-care menu around accessing dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins for when children feel unloved, what can they go to to release that when they feel unmotivated, when they feel struggling with confidence and um unstable in mind, and when they feel in pain. And like in the course of my teaching career, I've lost four amazing young men to suicide when they've left our care and have late teenage years, early 20s, and it's heartbreaking. It's like those parts of me now that regret why didn't I do this work earlier? Why didn't I give them these strategies to help them? Like, I still see their families about in our local community. I told their sisters, and it's really, really heartbreaking, and that fuels a lot of our work. And then kind of step eight and nine is around creating a bespoke programme for schools and then celebrating success. So we we celebrate our teachers, we celebrate our children, and we celebrate the school through through co-creator case studies to really kind of build the the power of what what schools are doing for families because we know that family connection can be a challenge at some places post-lockdown, and we also know evidence in it for Ofsted and performance management and and and helping everyone see how amazing our educators are in this country because we've got some hero educators up and down the country that do so much incredible work and often don't get the credit for it, and our job is to really position them as the heroes and get them the credit they deserve. And thankfully, you saw one of those case studies, and that's why we're having that conversation today.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

That's why we're here, yeah. It absolutely is, and and you too are one of those heroes, Neil. I mean, I know you touched there on you know the devastating, you know, fact that you know we have lost some of our young people to suicide, and you know, we carry them forward with us in in all of our future work that we do. Um so I think really what we're talking about here actually is a vehicle of hope, you know, the fact that there can be such a thing as post-traumatic growth, you know, there really is a way that we can champion, you know, you mentioned ACEs before, you know, even our children and young people with some of the highest ACE scores. I mean, if there was maybe something almost practical that I could do tomorrow as a geography teacher or a psychology teacher, or what little bit of essence do you think I could kind of take into my practice tomorrow that might just help the young people a little bit? Because that I mean, that must have been magic for the MFL teacher. I mean, you know, kind of having you know the boys just kind of rocking up, being able to kind of really perform their best. I mean, yeah, how can other teachers who are listening also embrace that?

SPEAKER_01 28:39

I love that. Um we we always start with the Mr. Pigton video when Ian Wright means meets Mr. Pigton. And I I think fundamentally at the crux of that, how Mr. Picton changed Ian Wright's life was through the power of relationships, through the love, the guidance, but also the structure. So I think I think some of the misconceptions around trauma-informed practice is a bit wishy-washy. And um that that's that's when it's not done properly. When it's done properly, it's finding that balance between nurture and structure because both provide that love and the safety guide guardrails to help children flourish. And certainly in on my trauma-informed journey that I've been on, yeah, I've been in a school where it's way too structure-heavy, where it felt like a prison. Then I went on this trauma-informed journey where I was probably too much nurturing. The children were running my classes, and I had to find that balance between the two. And that balance would change depending on on the child's child's story and and the knowledge. So, for example, I had one girl, amazing, amazing girl, really struggling with emotional regulation, running up and down corridors, shouting F off, booting doors, and all that. Yeah, and on the surface, you'd say, All right, that's not acceptable. But then when you find out that a brother, we lost her brother over lockdown to suicide, and she's struggling with intergenerational trauma and financial lockdown, sudden, suddenly that story becomes understandable, and having that conversation around, look, I heard what happened, I'm here for you. I can't begin to imagine how you're feeling. But if you ever want to come and talk, I'm here for you. And all of a sudden she was a different girl, and like a lot of the staff didn't know a story or hadn't taken the time to learn that and acknowledge that and have that conversation. But from then on in, anything she need, anytime she she she was struggling, you can the staff could call me and I could calm her down and help her regulate, and and and then all of a sudden she'd be the nicest girl in the world again. And um, that's a really simple story. But on the other hand, I've got a six-year-old son who's got zero aces, who's wrapped in love, and he doesn't need that same kind of flexibility. Often he needs a cuddle or a biscuit or a or a sleep or something like that. But but how how I manage those two children are very differently based on my knowledge of their story, and that's why understanding your children's stories, getting to know them, positive meet and greet, face, voice, body, cues of safety um are just so so key and can make such a transformational difference.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Absolutely. So, I mean, again, you know, we always say it's it really is about relationships, but it really truly is. You know, you were, you know, again, going back to you know, to the girl you were just talking about there, you know, her safe adult in that moment. Um, and I think, you know, again, I love as well, Neil, how you touched upon, you know, actually how trauma-informed approaches, they're not a soft approach to behaviour, they're not an instead of, you know, we still have those high expectations of our young people, but it's not bubble wrapping poor behaviour. And I think that's kind of something that I hear quite a lot. I don't know whether you've got any reflections there on how we can actually have our cake hand eat it. And it's probably a bad analogy to use with someone like yourself who's just been talking about health. But yeah, I don't know what your reflections might be there.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Yeah, 100%. I think I think we've got a real important job as people in this space to to address those misconceptions and say, look, this isn't a soft touch, this is how we optimise performance for our young people and optimise outcomes for our young people. So we've got this this kind of five-step model around managing behaviours without re-traumatising children, but still maintaining high standards. And the first is about reducing unnecessary rules because we used to have this rule where children in the summer term the caretaker complained one day that the dance floor was messy and muddy. Um, so we uninvert inadvertently introduced this rule that children need to take their trainers off to cut or shoes off to come into the dance studio to register for peeing. And that led to so much conflict because we were looking down at shoes, take your shoes off, take your shoes off, rather than looking at faces and saying, How are you? Great to see you. And and we just scrapped that rule in that September time when we started this journey, and it made such a difference. The second step is around those cues of safety, that that positive meeting greed, the psychological safety cues on our estate again with lots of girls that lots of children that have witnessed domestic violence, and it's around right as a male PE teacher, I need to soften my voice, I need to smile more, I need to stop having such a neutral face. Where children that suffered ACEs were perceiving me as being angry when I wasn't at all, but I need to exaggerate that. Actually, I'm great, I'm delighted you're here today. It's so good to see uh high-fives, fist bumps, handshakes, whatever's authentic to you, make children feel really, really welcome. And then it's around kind of understanding Bruce Perry's neurosequential model about regulate, relate, reason, and understanding what's happening in that that child's brain when they are dysregulated and not taking it personally. Like as PE teachers, often we want to win the behavior battle. And I had to do a lot of work around acceptance and curiosity and empathy. Um, looking at the work of Dr. Dan Hughes and the pace model, um, sometimes the use of humour around playfulness as well. Um, I'm not very funny, so I tended to stay away from that. I tended to go around acceptance curiosity. Yeah, but then the final part which really made the difference was getting that balance between nurture and instructor that I just talked around, around getting the right balance because it can be really, really tricky finding that right balance. And that is, I think, the crux of it. The challenge for us as educators now is around knowing your children's stories and where does that line look like and fit like for different children in the same class. Yeah, the challenges of consistency, and I I get all of that. I've lived that for 20 years, but sometimes some children need something different and need to have a bit more leniency, and some children need a bit more strict, strict, stricter love and care, and and whatever's fine, but trust our teachers, our educators to find that appropriate balance, and then obviously you have your restorative conversations and repairing the ruptures after that. But that was the thing that helped us reduce send-outs by 95%, and that's what helped create a feeling where children felt safe enough to move and use movement for regulation, and then build their self-care toolkits on the back of that.

SPEAKER_00 35:03

I love that. That's yeah, really, really powerful stuff for sure. So I'm gonna be a bit cheeky. I'm a teacher, I love a free resource. Is there anything I can have a little look at?

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Of course. We've we've got a huge range of taster resources from podcasts to scorecards to taste of courses, but I think what I would say to to colleagues that are listening that are interested in knowing more is um in the show notes, we'll put in a school well-being scorecard. It takes three minutes, and from that you'll get a personalised report around what your school's already doing. It's a real safe space to reflect. There's no judgment there, the data's not shared with anyone else, it's just for you to have a look at that. We've got a trauma-informed frontline educator scorecard, again, a real safe space to reflect on your practice and think about opportunities to develop. But like the opportunities for movement, for regulation and belonging wrapped in care are huge, and the the real opportunities there in your school, and we'd very much welcome the opportunity to partner with you, with TIC. We're really keen to collaborate further, aren't we, Jessica? In in terms of our connected communities and support each other to help help more educators to transform children's life chances.

SPEAKER_00 36:13

100%. Well, Neil, thank you so much. I mean, again, gonna be cheeky. If there was just one golden message that you would hope that our listeners would take away from today, no pressure, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 36:25

I mean the power of movement wrapped in relationships, wrapped in care. Like it doesn't really matter what the movement is, like any type of movement is gonna help a young child, whether that's around regulation, belonging, but that wrapped in care key bit is the key aspect. It's not just thrash away at a punch bag aimlessly because that's gonna make them over arouse, it's around the care aspect that is the most important thing for us.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

Yeah, and I think for me again, it's just seeing relationships in a different way through, you know. As I say, I hadn't really thought fully about movement and just how extensive it would be, like beyond the PE kind of um, I was gonna say PE classroom, that's how out of touch I am. Um so it's really been an education for me today, Neil, to kind of see another application um of trauma-informed practice and of course, you know, certainly taking away how much preventative work we're able to do as schools and you know what a real honour and privilege it really is. So thank you so much, Neil, for joining me today.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Thanks so much for having us, Jessica. It's been great, great to meet you, great to talk to you, and thank you to everyone who's listened to the podcast. We really appreciate that and do reach out if you'd like any more information.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

Oh, thanks everyone, and thank you, Neil. Thank you so much for joining us. To learn more, visit the Trauma Informed Consultancy Services website. We'll see you next time.