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Fewer children are school remotely in11/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Learning requires a dependency (Bion, 1969) and for the children at the Mulberry Bush School, uncertainty in the past has hurt t hem and healthy dependency doesn’t exist because it hasn’t been modelled and then internalised by having a consistent, good enough caregiver (McLeod, 2017). Classrooms are scary, loud places and learning requires a submission and a tolerance of uncertainty (Bion, 1969). Many of the children referred to the school have been excluded from mainstream schools on multiple occasions because their behaviour was too challenging to manage. Typically, children at the Mulberry Bush School struggle to learn in a classroom. Essentially, as they enter a classroom, Mulberry Bush School children’s Frontal Cortex and Limbic systems responsible for abstract and emotional thought are switched off and the Brainstem, a reflexive part of the brain, is activated which pumps stress hormones around the body heart rate speeds up in order to direct oxygen to the muscles in preparation for fight, flight or freeze ( Perry and Szalavitz, 2006). Perry and Szalavitz (2006) discuss how children who have e xperienced trauma, have a sensitized stress-response system which causes them to respond to normal situations as if it is threatening. The children at the Mulberry Bush find this all very, very difficult. Whereas a ctive involvement in their learning requires them to comply with school and class rules, persist in concentrating, and exhibit self-directive behaviour (Cadima et al., 2015). A child’s passive involvement in their learning could be more of a compliance to complete the task – there is less actual engagement and the child’s behaviour indicates a lack of interest and a lack of involvement in the task. ![]() ![]() For me, engagement can be active or passive. Engagement has been linked to positive outcomes and high educational performance (Veiga et al., 2016) and is a predictor of children’s success at school (Lee, 2012). First, working with these children, I am particularly interested in what engages them. I chose to look at engagement and remote learning for several reasons. Unfortunately, as this child has left the school, there is no longer enough reliable data to include her in this research. Over the remote learning period in March 2020, Kelly went from having 3 x remote learning sessions a week to having 2 x a day. Before the remote learning period, Kelly was the child throwing pencils at me. In Kelly’s final placement report at the school before she left the school in June 2020, it mentioned her engagement in the remote learning and how over this period, she had begun to read out-loud when she had previously never done this. ![]() I chose to investigate this area of my practice because I noticed an improvement in engagement by a child I met twice a day for 2 months during the first lockdown, Kelly. However, I’m not sure I agree with Chzhen et al., (2022) who describes how remote learning has damaged many children’s engagement with school. Class adults and children at the Mulberry Bush School found remote learning challenging: adults had less ability to scaffold the learning experience for the children (Juuti, 2021) and children had to be resilient to the changes in a task that they already found difficult. Becker et al., (2020) recognises that engagement in remote learning varied but children with mental health and/or learning difficulties found it particularly challenging. Although the guidance is clear that educators at SEND schools are best placed to know about what is best to meet the children’s needs, it still implies that children in these settings should receive remote education (Department of Education, 2022). Being relatively new to the organisation, I was expected to transition to remote learning and then deliver one-to-one lessons with children who had previously thrown pencils at me when I had asked them to sit down. I started at the Mulberry Bush, a therapeutic community, school and residential care home for children aged 6-13 who have experienced early childhood trauma 2 months before the first national lockdown. This was a stressful time for teachers, pupils and parents who had very little time to prepare (Khlaif et. UNESCO (2021) reported that more than 1.37 billion children from 190 countries were forced to transition to remote learning instead of in-person education during the outbreak of COVID 19. The theme of my action research is the teaching and learning during a National Lockdown when schools were responsible for organising and delivering a minimum of 3 hours a day of remote learning to children in KS1 and 4 hours in KS2 (Department of Education, 2022). ![]()
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