• Setting: Service-wide. Local authority schools and workforce
• Location: Powys
• MiSP Curricula: .b Foundations, Paws b and .b
• Age group/s: Adults and young people 7-16
• Author: Linda Gutierrez
• Role: Emotional Health and Wellbeing Lead, Pupil Referral Service South and Mid Powys

About Powys Local Authority

Powys is the largest county in Wales, covering an area of some 2000 square miles, with a small population of around 132,000. Small schools and a workforce covering a wide geographical area makes it a challenge to develop and embed new initiatives. We train staff in a range of evidence-based interventions and, as a local authority, take an inclusive approach to ensure that opportunities for training and support are shared amongst our multi-agency workforce.

Linda’s Training:

• MBSR
• Teach .b
• School Mindfulness Lead

I began my training as a cognitive behavioural therapist, which included a three-day masterclass in depression with Dr Melanie Fennell from Oxford. I was aware of mindfulness, but despite the evidence-base, could not really see me delivering or practising it. From the moment I observed Melanie, so skilfully and profoundly guiding those first practices, I realised that this was something that could become part of me and my work, not just as a therapist but also in my inclusion work in schools.

I was on the hunt for evidence-based practice to address inclusion, attendance and behaviour issues for a Welsh Government pilot. I knew that I wanted to get mindfulness in there, so I turned to MiSP. I trained to teach .b in 2011 and we introduced it into schools.

Outcomes:

We were keen to build our toolkit of evidence and ran a small randomised control trial that showed children who took part in .b reported improved wellbeing during a particularly turbulent time in the school compared to their counterparts who did not take part in .b.

A Pathway for Powys - the importance of sustainability and inclusivity

Responding to the Pandemic

A sustainable and inclusive model

Introducing mindfulness into your setting

Thank you so much to Linda for the inspiring work she is doing. Her talk at the conference is available for Hub members here.

The post Offering mindfulness throughout the Powys County Council Pupil Referral Service: An inclusive and sustainable model. appeared first on Mindfulness in Schools Project.

Parents are an important part of the school community, and involving them in school life can be a fantastic opportunity whilst also sometimes feeling like a challenge.

Providing information

We encourage all schools who are teaching mindfulness to their students to let parents know that they are doing this. You can download information leaflets and template letters home to parents, explaining what mindfulness is and why you are teaching in, on our Hub.

You can also send them summaries of Impact Data or point them to our Case Studies to provide further evidence about the benefits of mindfulness.

You can also include information about mindfulness on your school website, and include links to the MiSP website for parents to investigate themselves.

Offering information sessions for parents

Many schools offer an information session about mindfulness to parents. We recommend you deliver the Introduction lesson which is designed for this purpose and should include all the information you need to share. This may be offered alongside a parents’ evening, or before or after another event the school may be holding such as a PTA meeting. Now that schools are offering more information online, you may choose to offer this as a webinar for parents to attend.

You can also recommend that parents look at information on our website, and of course they would also be very welcome at our free Information Webinars which we run regularly. You can find details here: https://mindfulnessinschools.org/information-events/

Showing the curricula to parents

Some schools like to offer the whole Paws b or .b course to a parent group, to help them with the following:

• Understanding what the students are learning about.
• Sharing a language around the practices, e.g. amygdala, FOFBOC, Beditation etc
• Perhaps stimulating their interest so that they in turn might want to go on and do an adult mindfulness course.

This has worked well and adults seem to respond just as well to MiSP materials as students do, but please note, these sessions are not intended as adult mindfulness courses, just a way for parents or staff to better understand what their child or the pupils will be doing.

Offering a mindfulness course to parents

For schools that want to offer a full eight week mindfulness course to parents (or to staff) there are several options:

1. Support a staff member to become your School Mindfulness Lead. This will qualify them to teach .b Foundations, an 8 week introduction to mindfulness, to adults in the school community, including staff and parents. This is the most sustainable way to be able to offer this in-house on an ongoing basis.
2. Contact us to arrange us to host a group of parents or staff on .begin. This is a live, online eight week introduction to mindfulness and a really convenient way to encourage participation. We usually run these in the evenings so parents or staff can access the training from home. Email us at enquiries@mindfulnessinschools.org
3. Invite in an external .b Foundations teacher. You can find teachers on our map here.
4. Visit the British Association for Mindfulness Based Approaches website to find a teacher in your area. They will be able to deliver MBCT or MBSR to a group of adults in your school.

Over to the children and young people!

We have learnt that one of the most effective ways of parents learning about mindfulness is them being shown practices by the children! Pupils, particularly the younger ones, often can’t help but tell their parents all about it, demonstrating practices and explaining how they can help.

This can often begin conversations, which you can then build upon.

<< Read Top Tip: Getting students to have a go    Read Top Tip: How do I fit Paws b or .b in? >>

The post Top Tips: Involving Parents appeared first on Mindfulness in Schools Project.

The nights are drawing in, the temperature is dropping and the Christmas adverts are out – it’s starting to feel very much like the end of the year. For many of us this might be a good time to begin to reflect on what we want to achieve in 2020, professionally, personally, and in terms of our own mindfulness journeys.

Here at MiSP we believe that your own mindfulness practice plays a hugely important part of being able to teach mindfulness to children and young people. It supports your understanding of what mindfulness is, what it is like to practice, what the challenges are, what the joys are, and how it can support you as you encounter each new moment. It enables you to role model some of the values and attitudes of mindfulness to the children that you teach, and, perhaps, take a sanguine approach to the lesson as it unfolds …

This is why MiSP are committed to supporting to you on your own continuing mindfulness journey. We host a Hub Sitting Group twice a month to enable you to meet online to share practise and discussion with other educators. We are also aiming to increase the number of face-to-face opportunities for you to meet up with others in our mindfulness community, and are delighted to be able to invite you to:

• Our Reconnection and CPD Days, which will be held on Thursday, 23^rd January in London. We will discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching mindfulness in schools and update you on developments in the sector including running through MiSP’s new materials. Please do come along – you can book here.
• Our 2020 Conference, which will be held on Saturday, 20^th June 2020 in London. We are very much looking forward to coming together for a day of discussion and practice around the theme of ‘Teaching Mindfully’. Our speakers will explore the challenges and rewards of teaching mindfulness to young people in schools, and we will also be running mindfulness sitting groups throughout the day and providing an opportunity for networking with other teachers in our community. Grab an Early Bird ticket here.

If you are a graduate of .begin, we would also warmly invite you to now plan to attend a train to teach course in 2020, so that you can bring mindfulness to the children in your school. We have Teach Paws b (for primary schools) and Teach .b (for secondary schools) running in the new year in both term time and holiday time. If you will struggle to pay for your place, we can provide Supported Places for schools in areas of high deprivation. Please do take a look at our course dates.

Finally, if you are already a MiSP Trained Teacher and would like to take your journey a step further, why not come on our residential School Mindfulness Lead course to train to introduce mindfulness to the other adults in your school? We are running this course in April 2020 and August 2020, and, again, Supported Places are available. The six day SML course is a real opportunity to spend time with other practitioners and learn how to teach the eight-week course .b Foundations to your school colleagues. This will be a retreat experience for you – as Jason Steele, CEO of Raise The Youth Foundation remarked after participating in the course:

‘It energized me and I could find myself again. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to embed mindfulness in their school’
(Read more about Jason’s mindfulness experiences)

Please do take the chance to think about your own mindfulness journey for 2020. We really hope you will be able to participate as part of our community and we look forward to seeing you during the year.

The post Continuing Your Mindfulness Journey in 2020 appeared first on Mindfulness in Schools Project.

Raise the Youth Foundation is a not-for-profit social enterprise dedicated to bringing people, partnerships, communities and industry together, to raise the youth and invest in young people’s future. Since it was founded in 2011 by CEO Jason Steele, Raise has had a clear vision for its future – to invest in vulnerable young people (aged 11-25) by ensuring that every child at Raise has the opportunity to learn, develop and, ultimately, realise their true potential in life.

In a recent interview, Jason told us why mindfulness has become an organisation-wide approach providing a crucial foundation for Raise as a whole …

Tell us about the young people that Raise supports…

Our young people have many individualised needs, ranging from mental health, trauma, adverse childhood experiences, multiple exclusions, many placement moves, school phobias and anxiety, separation, loss and being unable to have their needs met in other forms of education. As a Trauma Informed organisation, we fully understand that our young people’s frustrations, feelings, thoughts and difficulties at managing their school day, can lead to expressing their feelings from a heightened state of fear, pain, rage, grief and need high levels of care and support.

Our young people are often reacting to such feelings, thoughts, body sensations and urges by reacting to fight, flight, freeze. Other young people have high levels of anxiety around exams, who need to be supported to settle down to learn and have the skills to manage their anxiety, building the confidence and knowledge to understand how to face their fears and know that they ‘can do it.’

What does Raise aim to do?

At Raise we believe in opening our arms and our hearts to the children and we endeavour to inspire our young people each and every day. We want to show them a different way of being and teach them new skills, delivering education in a way that works for them and putting them at the centre of everything we do. We believe in them and try to help them to believe in themselves.

Our team of highly talented multi-disciplinary professionals create innovative plans to address each young person’s unique needs.

Who practices mindfulness at Raise Education and Wellbeing School?

Mindfulness is a way of life for Raise. It is not something just for the children. It is integrated into the way we operate and embedded as a whole school approach, supporting our children, young people and staff. Doing the work we do can be tough for staff and mindfulness provides the tools to self-regulate, to be able to do their best for the children. It gives us all space to reflect. We’ve trained everyone, from teachers, directors, TAs, social workers to our cleaners, finance and administration teams. Our work can be challenging and mindfulness enables us to extend non-judgement and kindness to all the people we deal with on behalf of the children. This helps us to achieve better outcomes whilst looking after ourselves. I also feel that our mindful approach has an impact on the other agencies we deal with, and the wider community recognises the values we have.

How do the young people learn mindfulness?

Our young people at first learn mindfulness informally by seeing how we behave. We are role models for them, as it takes a whole community to raise a young person. We then offer opt-in mindfulness practices. We do body scans in the same room that the young people sit their exams in, so they learn to manage that anxiety in that space. We also teach them how to do a ‘FOFBOC’ and a ‘.b’. We have ‘.b’ stickers everywhere!

Often weekends can be very difficult for our young people so every Monday is a Wellbeing Monday. Last year we offered the whole .b curriculum as a voluntary programme and of 9 young people who started it, 6 completed it and we found them teaching it to the other children! So, this coming year, we will offer the .b curriculum as part of Personal and Social Development lessons and expect these formal lessons to pick up momentum alongside the informal practices we do.

How can Raise afford to train everyone?

I train everyone myself. This means we don’t have to pay for external courses, we can shape the training sessions around the Raise day, we don’t have to travel anywhere and I can schedule it at the best time for staff and their wellbeing. Train the trainer is an affordable, sustainable model. I went on the School Mindfulness Lead course to learn how to teach .b Foundations and can honestly say it was the most brilliant training. Since 2011, I have worked non-stop to get Raise where it needs to be, and I went on the SML course and it took me two days to stop twitching and realise what it was all about. My trainers, Jem and Dom, just oozed mindfulness and it was truly a retreat for me. It energized me and I could find myself again. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to embed mindfulness in their school. Wellbeing is paramount for both adults and children working together. If we’re not all well, we can’t succeed.

How did you first learn about mindfulness?

I discovered mindfulness through a book which I actually bought for someone else: Vidyamala Burch’s “Living Well with Pain and Illness – Using Mindfulness to Free Yourself From Suffering”. This book had a profound impact on me. I had been working really, really hard to make Raise the Youth work and to establish the Raise Education and Wellbeing School . I’d had my own range of challenges in life and learning and was experiencing ongoing pressures as I tried to balance everything. Reading this book, and finding mindfulness, changed my relationship with difficulty. I began to practice mindfulness myself and learnt more and more about it.

Why was it important to you to establish mindfulness as a whole school approach?

Mindfulness helps individuals grow and develop and get ready to fulfil their true potential. It helps people engage with their work, their studies, their relationships and, really, their lives. It plays a central role in giving us the capacity to manage our circumstances, whether we are adults or young people. I am pretty confident that mindfulness is well-embedded at Raise and even if I wasn’t around mindfulness at Raise is here to stay. But I’m not going anywhere!

Jason was an inspirational speaker at our 2019 conference.You can see photos and videos of the day here.The School Mindfulness Lead course takes place in Bloxham, Oxfordshire, and we are running a course next week, from 17th-23rd August 2019, which still has a couple of places left. Booking is also open for next year’s courses which will be held from 3rd-9th April 2020 and 21^st–27^th August 2020. Do take Jason’s recommendation and join us there!

The post Embedding mindfulness at Raise the Youth Foundation appeared first on Mindfulness in Schools Project.