Gareth is Educational Advisor for Studio III and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. He spent twenty-five years working in schools, seventeen of them as SENCo in a large, inclusive secondary school in the north-west of England, and he is one of the most recognised authorities anywhere on low arousal approaches.
What the week is for
Gareth will be working with staff, children and parents on the thing that sits underneath everything else a school does: relationships, and how we keep them steady.
The straightforward days are not the hard part. The hard part is holding a relationship together when a child is overwhelmed, when an adult is tired, and when both know each other well enough to find exactly the wrong words. Low arousal approaches give the adults around a child practical ways to bring the temperature down rather than up — and they work as well at the kitchen table as they do in the classroom.
A continuation, not a new direction
This is the next step along a road we have been walking for a long time. It builds on the trauma-informed work this school has done for years, on the nine weeks of restorative practice that our staff completed together, and on last year's Adaptive Classroom training. Each of those has been a layer, and Gareth's visit adds another to the same structure rather than starting a new one.
There will be opportunities during the week for parents to meet and work with Gareth, in private consultation sessions and at a parent workshop. More details will follow very soon.
