Co-creating Compassionate Secondary Schools
Teachers: We need you!
· Are you interested in supporting the co-creation of a Compassionate School model which could enhance the grief and death literacy of the school community and support wider social change?
· Do you have experiences and expertise from your teaching life that you could share around the subject of death, dying and grief?
· Do you already teach death, dying and loss as part of PHSE – or other areas of the curriculum?
· Do you feel that, as a society, we should get better at talking about death, dying and grief with young people?
Brief Context: Death affects us all: it is a unifying part of life. However, many individuals lack the confidence and language to talk about death, dying and grief. This is particularly the case with children and young people (CYP), who are often left out of such conversations because, for many adults, their own anxiety becomes pronounced when it involves CYP. And yet, by the age of 16-years, 78% CYP have experienced the death of a close relative or friend (https://doi.org/10.1006/jado.2001.0379), leaving many CYP facing lasting mental health problems when their grief is not supported, with devastating statistics linking unresolved child bereavement and future life chances.
The school environment is an ideal place to normalise discussions of death, dying and grief as part of wider education for wellbeing. Thus, drawing on Allen Kellhear’s concept of the compassionate community, this project aims to break down what is almost a taboo around the subject of death, dying and grief, by engaging with the school community (including staff and children and young people), to enhance the grief and death literacy of the future generation and bring about wider societal change, through the codesign of a Compassionate school model.
This model aims to nurture the confidence, care and language of pupils and school staff to support wellbeing within the secondary school community and beyond….but we need the expertise of the teaching community.
For more information or to contribute please contact Dr Jane Booth on J.Booth3@wlv.ac.uk
