Restoring Education

‘As the adults in school, we have the chance to be the agents of genuine change. It’s essential we stop ‘doing school’ as we’ve always done, creating one-size-fits-all, trauma-inducing systems instead of intentionally increasing safety for all. Let’s not have pupils and teachers apprehensive about being in school; let’s have remaining steady and connected as our priorities ... Fundamentally, let’s honour the need for all our pupils to be educated in school together through attuned relationships and understanding.’ Louise Michelle Bombèr

This is the radical challenge from Louise Michelle Bombèr, founder of the UK’s leading specialist trauma service in schools, TouchBase, in her timely new book, Restoring Education. 

Stories of the huge range of difficulties schools face are rarely positive, with increasing rates of pupil mental health problems, and children unable to settle to learn. Teachers’ stress has soared, many leaving the profession they love. The most vulnerable pupils, already struggling with relational trauma and loss, are communicating distress through challenging behaviour which can get them excluded if their relational needs are not recognised and responded to.

Restoring Education introduces an alternative, and realistic hope. Drawing on their work at TouchBase and knowledge of child development, attachment and trauma, Louise Michelle Bombèr and members of her team, Jennie Fellows, Louise Kilshaw, Luke Palmer, Tamsin Lotter and Catherine Michell write with passion and clarity about a radically different approach, one firmly grounded in relationship first, before learning can start. They challenge Heads to model authentic leadership, enabling staff to feel safe, regulated and well-resourced in our schools. On this basis, educators can enable pupils to experience safety in school, be co-regulated, trust adults, and be supported into learning.

Illustrated with practical examples, the authors discuss different aspects of relationship, which, woven together, offer a refreshing vision of how school can be, for pupils and staff, when safety through genuine relationship is prioritised as the foundation of learning.