Teachers

Emotional literacy support assistants

Teaching assistants

Learning mentors

Higher level teaching assistants

Others working with young people

Skills for learning are influenced by three key areas:

The tools, skills, beliefs, and attitudes the learner has when entering the classroom;

The learning environment (both the school and the classroom);

Education is divided into two specific areas: the curriculum, which looks at content and knowledge, and the learning skills curriculum, which focuses on developing the skills, attitudes, and values needed to learn.

The Skills for Learning course explores the complex process of learning and looks at some of the reasons why the teaching-learning process may fail. It explores how a range of issues can act as barriers to learning. These barriers can be personal, attitudinal, organisational, or emotional. The course also uses the work of Bristol University and their Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI), which identifies 7 skills that make a successful learner and ways these skills can be developed within the classroom. Some children and young people (CYP) have not had the benefit of a positive early years’ experience with an attuned and sensitive carer. For these CYP, schools provide a second chance at developing the skills that enable them to learn successfully. The course also explores the impact of the learning relationship, and how working with an experienced attuned adult can give children a second change at developing their skills for learning, better interaction, and relationships.

Later, the course then moves onto looking at classrooms as complex living communities. It explores how the climate that is created and perpetuated has a profound impact on the quality of learning and the skills, attitudes, and values CYP develop.

By supporting practitioners to create a positive classroom environment, with effective skills for learning at its core, this course enables schools and practitioners to support CYP in managing the complex challenges they may encounter in the future and the tools to develop positive foundations for mental health and wellbeing.

One of the five books in the Mental Health and Wellbeing Teacher Toolkit, this practical resource focuses on the topic of ‘Skills for Learning’. The book offers research-driven, practical strategies, resources, and lesson plans to support educators and health professionals. This is a resource book for practitioners looking to have a positive impact on the mental health and wellbeing of the children and young people in their care; both now and in the future. Chapters span key topics including Metacognition, Learning Dimensions, Problem Solving, and Cognitive Strategies.

Skills for Effective Learning in School: Supporting Emotional Health and Wellbeing

Alison Waterhouse has worked in mainstream, special education, and the independent sector for the past 30 years, specialising in working with children with Additional Educational Needs (AEN) including Mental Health and Wellbeing.

Alison set up and developed an Independent Therapeutic Special School in Kent. She then moved into mainstream schools where she worked as a Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCo) and Inclusion Manager. Alison then went on to develop an innovative role in mainstream schools, titled, 'Teacher in Charge of Social and Emotional Wellbeing of the Whole School Community’.

Alison has worked with the Anna Freud Centre, Young Minds, and Optimus training staff in schools on topics including  attachment, emotional barriers to learning, mental health and wellbeing, and becoming a trauma sensitive school. She now works as an Independent Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Mental Health and Wellbeing Adviser. Alison is also a qualified Educational Psychotherapist and has her own practice in East Sussex.

Alison has spent the past 8 years developing the ‘Circles for Learning’ project in schools. Circles for Learning trains and then supports teachers to bring a parent and young child into the classroom (at the KS1 - KS3 level) once a month for a year. This amazing experience allows children to observe the development of relationships, watch learning unfold, understand how our sense of self develops, and observe and understand emotions and the ways in which they impact on our behaviour. With the guidance and support of their teacher they explore and think about what they have seen and how this may link to their own development, learning, thinking, behaviour, and ways of interacting with others. These parent young child observation visits are the provocation or stimulus to follow up work led by the teacher exploring each of the five essential elements that form the foundations for positive mental health and wellbeing.

Alison has undertaken primary research project and a Masters looking at the impact of the project on children and young people (CYP) within schools. Whilst developing the project she has assorted the knowledge into five resource books which have been published by Routledge. They make up the Mental Health and Wellbeing Teachers Toolkit.