TRAUMA & SCHOOL
Recent studies estimate two-thirds of students have experienced trauma before the age of 16, while new research suggests that as many as 13 out of 30 students in an average classroom will have toxic stress from three or more traumatic experiences.
Childhood trauma and toxic stress are recognised as the world’s leading health epidemic and only recently have its consequences and remedies started trickling down to education policy and practice.
Trauma can be measured by “adverse childhood experiences”, or ACEs, which describe all types of abuse, neglect, and other traumatic experiences that happen to individuals under the age of 18.
There are events that we can generally expect are likely to produce a traumatic response in children; including natural disasters, grief and loss, life-threatening medical emergencies, or car accidents.
But complex trauma is much more damaging, as is chronic trauma because it happens repeatedly the impact on developing brains is so much more significant because we know how brains respond to repeated experiences.
Repeated experiences of fear and danger and hurt and isolation force the brain into survival mode and it takes the activity out of the learning parts of the brain, that frontal lobe.
Students exposed to three or more ACEs are:
- three times more likely to fail
- four times more likely to have poor health
- five times more likely to have severe attendance problems
- six times more likely to have severe behaviour problems
- almost six times more likely to have at least one physical, at least one mental and at least one developmental condition.
In the longer term, childhood trauma has been strongly linked to a number of health and social problems including substance abuse, incarceration, chronic disease, and early death.
Early intervention changing the way schools respond to and support trauma-affected children offers an opportunity to improve outcomes for many in society.
For teachers, studies show they do not feel adequately equipped with the knowledge and skills required to support the needs of students with challenging behaviours, and some strategies such as timeouts and exclusions exacerbate trauma-related behaviours.
There is a need to not only train teachers how to address the needs of students with trauma but also build the capacity of schools as a whole to support these students.
Settings that have implemented trauma-informed educational practices are reporting significant improvements in student social, behavioural and academic outcomes.
