What can Behaviour Tell us About Children’s Social and Emotional Development?
We learn about a pioneering approach to supporting pupils’ social and emotional development that’s made a big difference at one school in Windsor…
Social and emotional difficulties are often linked to adverse childhood experiences, such as developmental trauma. These difficulties present at school in a range of ways, including acting out or extremely withdrawn behaviour, oppositional and controlling responses, and heightened vigilance. Children’s self-concept is adversely affected and their academic progress held back.
I have worked as an educational psychologist with the team at Beech Lodge School in Berkshire for several years. The school offers a nurturing environment to develop both academic and social/emotional competence. We created a framework to support our work, because we wanted to get more information to understand the pupils’ social and emotional development and progress, but there’s an additional benefit in that the materials also help staff understand child development more generally.
This framework became known as Fagus – Latin for ‘beech tree’, AKA the tree of learning. It describes children’s typical development in 13 separate areas (see illustration) and includes online tools to efficiently identify a child’s progress in the form of Developmental Checklists and Developmental Profiles.
We soon discovered that Fagus had a wider appeal and application in a range of educational settings. St Edward’s First School is one such school, and has been using Fagus for over a year (see below).
At Beech Lodge, we find it helpful to understand behaviour as communication. Children’s behaviour tells us about their mood, level of understanding and experiences, as well as informing us about their development. Education practitioners can use the Fagus toolkit to help them understand the children they work with in relation to typical social and emotional development, and in turn use this to help them achieve the aspirations we have for all children.
Alastair Lidster is an educational psychologist. Find out more about FAGUS at fagus.org.uk
