In my school, we’ve gone on a journey through working towards becoming an adoption friendly school. So part of that was becoming trauma informed, but then also looking beyond that to how we can move on to supporting the families as they develop and grow and as the children develop and grow. So over the last six years, we’ve grown the population of children who are looked after or previously looked after to almost five or six times the national average. So we have a lot of children in our school who have had traumatic backgrounds. But to look at them, you wouldn’t see that because of the support we’re able to give them.

So there’s a lot of different ideas around what a key adult is. There’s the legal definition where they are providing an additional attachment figure to the children. But there’s a lot of work around considering that the key attachment adult as a champion for the child. I prefer to think of it as a bit of a circus. So if you were to imagine a circus, you have your ringmaster, who I would designate as the designated teacher, and then you have your lion tamer who is in the ring in the midst of it, the one who’s likely to have to deal with anything if it goes very, very wrong very quickly. They’re the person who are on site who is in a position to support, who knows exactly what’s going on, what the feeling is. They’re the one who’s involved. That’s the key adult. They’re the person who goes in every day who performs with that child, who’s there to provide the support for that child. They don’t move from their position. They have to be a supportive, calm, implacable rock for that child to lean on and to weather all their moods and difficulties as they find their regulation. So the key adult has to be the person who is in the thick of things, who is always there, who is always present, who becomes that advocate for that child, to become that stable base for that child at school.

So within many schools, you will find that the key adult is designated to the child. It’s whoever the school has available, whoever they got spare. In my school, I preferred to see how the children react to and deal with the members of staff. And then once I see who they’ve got that special attachment with or that beginning of a relationship, I will then move heaven and earth to be able to get that adult to be their key attachment figure. The thing is, for a lot of children, you don’t know what their trauma is. You don’t know what might be a trigger. It may be that the person you’ve got spare has dark hair, but they have a problem with ladies, with long, dark hair, and then they are never going to have that successful relationship. So you need to see what it is that would work best for that child and then try and create it.

So I’ve had children who have had key adults who have been learning support assistants or key adults who have been teaching assistants or teachers. And when that’s happened, I’ve done my best to move the teacher through the year group of the school to keep that adult with that child because they need the time to create that relationship and they need the space to have it. And you can’t dictate who that child’s going to connect to. Obviously, you have to work within the realms of your budget and within the realms of your staffing. But generally speaking, within a school, you will find that one person. And if you can’t release that one person from the original role, you can still buy them the time to build that relationship with the child depending on their need.

Generally speaking, in my experience, the children who have needed that adult with them more than just in terms of checking in, they tend to find that person who’s got that availability, and that’s the mix that they create so that it’s easier to do work around it. It’s very rare that they will choose somebody who isn’t able to be there every single day. Although that has happened, for instance, with a child with me. That they really, really want to work with me but being the head teacher, I wasn’t available every minute of every day. However, I did make a point of having that quiet time in my office with the child every single day at some point, and he knew it would always happen, and that was enough for him, for us to carry on that way. So yes, you can dictate the key adults, but you are far more successful if you allow the child to choose.

We’ve had a variety of children where they basically just want to know that they are being held in mind, that they are not being forgotten, that there’s somebody who’s looking forward to seeing them come in, who’s going to be there to help them find that transition between home and school, and to be able to work into getting into that school mode but once the child settled, that’s fine. They just need someone to pop in every now and again and to be there for the transition times to playtime and back in again. And then to be there at the end of the day when they transition to home. But we’ve also had children who are so anxious about being forgotten that they need to have that adult there, reassuringly within arm’s reach throughout the whole day.

So it can look very, very different depending on the trauma the child has undergone and how they are coping with it. And there’re so many different attachment styles that children have too, that even if it’s what they need, it’s not always easy to provide it and they don’t always want what we’re giving them either. And so it’s having that position where you respond to the child’s needs, not necessarily their wants. But what they need you to be for them and to be that stable presence, whether that’s every 10 minutes you’re there checking in or whether it’s only during transition times or whether they just need to know that you’re thinking of them and they can come to you if they want it.

The benefits of having a key adult are immense. So for our children, particularly the ones who’ve really struggled to separate from their adoptive parents as they’re coming in, or from their foster carers, they need that adult in order to feel secure. And we all know that if the child is not feeling secure, if we haven’t met those basic needs of food, safety, warmth and sleep, the children are never going to learn anything. So they are in a far better position to start their learning and to actually absorb some of what we’re trying to provide them when they have that key adult to provide that sense of security and safety and providing a continuity for the child. They really need continuity in order to feel less anxious and more able to access their learning.

It is vital that there is a relationship with the parents always. Whether that’s the foster parents, adoptive parents or birth parents, you need to have that relationship with that adult because that is the primary key attachment figure for that child. They know that child better than we ever will. They have the understanding of the triggers. They have the understanding of how the child’s truly feeling. So many children mask at school, are they’re like little shaken coke bottles that we send home. And then the poor, poor parent has to open that lid and bear with the brunt of all that anger and angst and anxiety coming out. So they have a far keener understanding of how the child is coping, generally speaking, than we do within the school.

So it’s vital that we create that relationship. And in fact, when we have children who are looked after or adopted coming in, we work really closely with those parents, before the children even set foot within the school, to create a relationship so that the parents know that we are on their side and we will do what we can and whatever we can to support their child. A lot of the times, parents come in prepared for a fight. They feel like they’re going to have to fight and claw for every little piece of support that their child can get or deserves. And for us to be able to go in and say, right, what can we do? How can we help? Let us know what we need to do and we will do it. It instantly creates that relationship with a parent who is able to say to us, actually, we’ve had a really bad morning this morning or this has happened or this is going on”. Or actually, the child’s really worried about this with you, or that, with someone else, and we’re able to respond more appropriately. I think if you try to create a key adult relationship with the child without having the parents involved, you would be so far behind where you would be if you’d actually created that relationship to begin with.

I think a lot of times the children who come into us really need that network of adults around them. If they’ve only got one strong adult, it’s like walking on a tightrope. If they’ve got a network of adults, then they’ve got a whole spider’s web of support underneath them. And that works so much better and it’s so much more secure for the child and they tend not to fall as far when they struggle.

Children need to have more than one person. That key attachment figure within the last few year could have had COVID and been off for a while. That child needs to have back up, and the best way to do that is to ensure that all the staff in the school are trained and they understand what attachment difficulties are and they understand the practical ways of supporting children who have trauma and attachment difficulties. And if everybody knows then every interaction that that child has with any of the other adults becomes a strand in that network of support. And it may be that that child doesn’t have that connection with an adult but every positive interaction and every time that they are co-regulated, every time that they are calmly met, they are supported in building that network. So the key adult has to weather so much of the child’s trauma and difficulties, that key adult needs themselves. So by having the supportive staff around, who understand what they’re trying to do with the child, they get support in place for the child, but they also get support in place themselves. The key adult is not a lone figure. They are just the focus and they have the support of all the figures in the background behind them. So they should always have the designated teacher behind them. But in addition to that, they will have the support of other staff, other people who are there, other people you can say, wow, that looks tough. Do you need a drink or just a hand on the shoulder and squeeze? You’re doing a great job. That’s all you need to kind of just keep yourself on an equilibrium so that you can continue to be that calm, stable figure for the child who needs you.

A lot of schools manage with transitions. They’re really, really good about transitioning into things but they forget to transition out. Every transition is an into and out of. So a lot of children, when they realise that they are leaving our school and moving on and that their key adult is not going with them, they will react by attempting to burn that bridge. They not only will burn it, they will bomb it and make sure there is no chance of that bridge standing and that being aware that that’s going to happen, a lot of the key adults are able to weather that a little better, but we have a lot of strategies to support the child in transitioning out. We do a lot of handovers. We start a lot earlier. So where we have a number of children who are transitioning off to a new year group in a new school, we will begin with our traumatised and looked after and adopted children. We will begin a lot earlier with them. We will create links with the school they’re moving on to. We will invite that school into ours and they will see us working together.

We make a real point of having our key adults working with the key adults to be so that that relationship is there and the child almost feels like they’re a baton being handed on rather than something being left. But we also make sure that we go with the child to the new environment and we hand them over so they see that happening. We create a hello and goodbye book so that they’re able to see what they’re saying goodbye to. But we also do regular letters. So a key adult, it’s almost like that advert a puppy’s not just for Christmas, a puppy’s for life. So a key adult isn’t just for the time the child is at school. That key adult creates a relationship with the family and keeps checking in. So even though we’ve got children who have moved to other areas of the country, we are still in regular contact with those families because you cannot be so involved in a family and then just walk away from it. So it’s just an email every now and again or a little photo, but it’s an opportunity for that child to know that we still hold them and we will still hold them. I will always remember my children who come through my school. I will always hold them and I will always hold them in mind and hope that they are okay, wherever they are and I will keep in touch as much as I can. Sometimes we’ve had children who’ve gone into the foster system and I have not been able to keep in touch, but I’ve always written them a letter that one day when they access their file, they know that I’m still thinking of them and that we are holding them because they need that. They need to know that they’re not just being left and abandoned. And it’s things like, for instance, like my key adults, we’ve had them read stories over zoom to the children during the holidays. Where the families are amenable, we do doorstep visits and discussions. We also invite the children into school. So if we’ve got children transitioning in, we will invite them in to come and see the school before it becomes busy with other children and things. And we work with the families so that if they transition into a new school, we will accompany them if they want us to, so that they know that even after a long stretch of summer holiday and they’re not coming back to our school, we will still go with them and we are not leaving them alone. And it’s that contact that we keep.

Sometimes it naturally tapers off as the children get older and they don’t need us anymore. But that’s a really important thing for them and it’s wonderful if they don’t need us because they’ve got other strands in their web by that point. That’s a really heartbreakingly beautiful thing to see. We’ve got other children where we are still in touch and it’s been a good six years since moved on from us. So we will always work to make sure that the children, as hard as they try to destroy the bridges because they feel that it’s easier to cut it off themselves and wait for them to be dropped. We will always make sure we keep that going until they don’t need us anymore.

A lot of our children have very difficult relationships. They don’t know how to create and repair those relationships. So when things break down from a child’s side, we will always have the adult present there to help them repair it and to help them make the steps they need to take to repair it so that they can then learn, in the long run, how to repair relationships when things go wrong.

Where we had a mismatch between a key adult and a child, that’s obviously far more difficult. Sometimes that mismatch can be addressed with additional training or additional time or additional support, but on occasion it’s just the wrong personality. We’ve had a person who’s, in their own personal life things became very difficult for her and she became very anxious and her anxiety was feeding into this loop with the child that she was supporting. So it started all alright, but as her life had become more tricky, she was finding it harder to be that stability and that calm influence on the child and we found that it became a very difficult relationship that started feeding into each other and building up anxiety between them. What we needed to do was give space to that key adult so that she had time to vent and explore her own concerns and her own triggers so that she was able to go into that situation in a calm manner. And we then also put things into place with the back-up adult. So she never had to do a long run with the child, which was when things would come to the head a bit more quickly. And if the child was having a particularly bad day, we would have that back up adult alongside the key adult. And that’s where it’s really important to have that back up network. As it turns out, that child also liked to come and spend some time under the desk in my office and I keep a little pirate ship in my office. So I just hear the cannon go off and I’d know right, okay, there’s a small person needing a bit of a break. But on occasion that adult needed to come into my office and just sit there for a bit and have a cup of tea and a cry. And we kind of managed to get it through that way.

As it turned out, her personal circumstances meant that she wasn’t going to be in a position to support that child the following year so we started to transition from her onto the backup adult where she would now become the backup, and backup would become the support adult. And that means that this year, starting in school, he still has the two familiar people. It’s just the roles are reversed and the backup person is now in a position to be their stability and their continuity. And as time goes on, we will begin to taper the original key adult down so that the child isn’t left, isn’t abandoned. She’ll still be there, but we will hopefully be able to give the support over to the backup adult. The child is going to dictate the time frame of that because some children can cope with it fairly quickly over three or four months. Some children might need half a year or longer to get to that point, but we will be working on that with the child.

It might seem like a waste of money to have key adults floating around the school, blowing bubbles or doing things that don’t look educational. However, not all children are going to need an adult at all times, but if they do, the repercussions of them not having that support are so vast and will impact so massively on the other children in the class that actually having that support in place. It’s a stitch in time. It saves so much hard work later on. So it’s not a case of worrying about money, if you spend a few pounds now, you will not have to spend the money that you will need to, to get additional support in place or alternative provision or time out, or any of those sorts of things you don’t really want to do to a child whose had trauma or is looked after or previously looked after. You need to be in a position to support that child and actually that is probably the best spent money in your school is the money you give to support those children because the net you create is not just for that child. All the other children in the class will see that relationship and they will benefit from the positivity that comes from it also.

And the other thing that I would say is time. Time is so precious in school. We don’t have the children for very, very long. We have 190 days with them in a school year, that’s 20% of their living lives in that year. We need to take the time to build the relationship, the support adults need the time to vent. They need the time to talk through what they’re doing so that they can give the time to the children. And it may feel like a waste of time if they are just blowing bubbles for the first six weeks of a year or if the child’s almost living in the school library. But actually by creating that relationship and giving that time now they will benefit and the child will benefit throughout the rest of the school career, and they won’t need as much later on. So money and time on the two things we don’t have a lot of in school, but they are the two most important things to give to the children who are looked after or previously looked after.