#4 - Unpacking Psychological Safety

In this episode of the School Can't Experience Podcast, hosted by Leisa Reichelt and featuring Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers from School Can't Australia, we discuss:

• Taking the lead and leaning on supporters when engaging with schools,
• Optimistic stories of alternative schools that cater well to children with School Can't,
• Understanding the need for psychological safety and what creates or destroys safety at school.

Transcript

Leisa Reichelt: 0:05

Hello and welcome to the School Can't Experience Podcast. I am Leisa Reichelt, and this podcast is brought to you by the School Can't Australia community. Caring for a young person who is struggling to attend school can be a stressful and isolating experience, but you are not alone. Thousands of parents across Australia and many more around the world face similar challenges and experiences every day. we hope this podcast gives you some new insight into what others are experiencing and some new ways of thinking about how to understand and support the young people in your life. We try to keep these podcasts fairly short to respect your precious time, but that doesn't mean we don't have lots to talk about when we're recording sometimes. So this episode joins together some of the great conversations we have recorded earlier, but we haven't been able to squeeze into an episode so far. Once again, I'm joined by Tiffany Westphal and Louise Rogers from School Can't Australia. And in this episode we are going to talk about how Tiffany and Lou manage to remain so calm when they talk about strategies for dealing with School Can't. We're going to talk about some inspiring and positive experiences we've had with some alternative schools who really seem to understand our School Can't young people. And we'll dig into what we really mean when we talk about feeling safe at school. But let's start off by trying to understand exactly how Tiffany sounds so much calmer than me when she talks about dealing with School Can't. The question that I have, Tiff is that when you were talking about it, it all sounded extremely calm and rational. When I look back, I just think, I learned so much on the go and I was in such a panic the whole time I was doing it. And I had an terrible psychologist multiple times, took me ages to find a good one who could actually help. OTs were like, honestly not that helpful either. None of them ever talked about accommodations at school, ever. The school treated us like we were the first people they'd ever come across whose kid was having trouble going to school. That was clearly our problem that we needed to fix. My son was getting more and more distressed all the time. And honestly, partly what I wanted to know was should I literally be forcing him to go to school every day. Or like, what if I just gave him time off? Like what would happen? Would I be doing the wrong thing? Would I be being bad if I just had a little circuit breaker in there. I mean, it got to the point where I really had no choice. Like there's no way that I could force him in the back of the car and get him to school. But I think that's part of it as well is there's so much distress that you're dealing with that you're just like, the child can't sit down and brainstorm with you what the problems are because they're just....

Tiffany Westphal: 2:34

It's incredibly stressful for both parent and child. And I think that's reflected in what you've just shared there, Leisa, how incredibly stressful. I remember feeling like I was having a nervous breakdown one weekend, dealing with this stuff really early on in the piece. Because the school was telling me that we needed to do one thing and I'm like, no, but that thing's going to escalate my child and make things worse. We can't do that thing. And so the ball was back in my court to try and figure out a solution, because the solution they were proposing was going to make things worse for my daughter. It's really, really stressful. And I think those early experiences of extreme distress have resulted in me being much more controlling of situations, and taking the lead. That's just come from experience. I go into meetings with schools supporting other people now and because I've got that, that past experience in what's helpful and what's not helpful and how to manage people I'm able to go into a meeting and, keep some kind of control over when a school is making suggestions to just be able to say, actually, that's not going to be helpful. That's likely to make things worse in my experience. And the, the family is suggesting this other thing here might be helpful, and I can say then in my experience, that's been helpful for other kids too, and it's worth considering. So it's certainly really helpful to have somebody who's got some, some lived experience or some past experience in supporting people in this space. Because as parents, we are supporting our children, we are managing our own demands and needs to try and manage the rest of the family's needs. Siblings who have been late to school because you can't get your child out the door to school in the morning. Difficulties getting to work in the morning, the difficulties with having to cancel appointments that you're not able to attend. There's so many challenging things about this situation, and I think, sometimes we need to look after our own nervous systems as parents. Because when you are in the thick of it and you are in distress, you are not able to think straight anymore either. You know, uh, your nervous system becomes really heightened and we end up joining our children in their distress. Then we can't co-regulate with them and we begin to risk communicating that things are good and, and they start to panic too. Oh mom's really distressed, so what hope have I got? Who's going to help me calm and feel better? There are no solutions if Mum or Dad can't figure this out, or the school can't figure this out. It escalates the child's distress. We need to think about the parent child unit as a unit. and sometimes we do need to take a circuit breaker. Sometimes we do need some time just to calm everybody's nervous systems down so we can think! Nobody can make decisions in meetings when people are distressed. When I'm giving advice to schools, I'm saying you need to be conscious of the family's nervous system in those meetings and how you can help them feel safe and calm and able to participate and contribute in collaborative discussions. So you need to think about safety in meetings. You need to think about, what's the exit plan? If somebody needs to leave the room, how many people are they going to have to crawl over to get to the door? Do they know where they can go if they feel they need to leave the room? Do they have a way of communicating that they're starting to feel distressed and need some time? Is it necessary for everybody to be in that room for that meeting? I know I've gone way off what your original question was

Leisa Reichelt: 6:14

Yeah, you're giving me flashbacks to all the school meetings that I've been to and how different they were from what you're describing.

Louise Roger: 6:21

Can I add something from before?

Leisa Reichelt: 6:23

Hmm

Louise Roger: 6:24

We, um, my child tried school again last year.

Leisa Reichelt: 6:27

mm-hmm

Louise Roger: 6:27

went to a specialist, uh, school, for children and young people who'd had difficulty in their mainstream environments. We only did the trial at the beginning of the year. But one thing that happened in the context of that is they sat down with all the parents and talked us through. By the end of that discussion, I felt a really big shift inside my body. And that was, a recognition that I could trust these people I had a good cry about it when I went home. I didn't know I was carrying that fear and, uncertainty. It was really quite a, a shift in myself to know that I could trust these people after our experiences.

Leisa Reichelt: 7:15

My son did a three week trial at the end of last year with a specialist school that supports kids who can't deal in mainstream school and similar kind of thing, that trust building process. The very first thing they did was hand us a clipboard with a whole bunch of accommodations and said, tick the ones that you think would really help your son. We went through it together and I'm just like, oh my God, where has this been forever? It was incredible. But then there were other things too during that, during that trial where they were able to really show him that they took his concerns seriously. And, if he said he was distressed, they were like, okay, fine. Well you go over here and have some time out and it's fine. There was none of this coercing to encourage him to participate in things that made him feel really uncomfortable. If he needed to take a break, he was able to take a break without being pulled back in. And when he had, situations where he was overwhelmed by stimulus or whatever it could be they sat down with him in a quiet place and helped him work through what was going on and helped him understand, you know, how could he cope with those sort of situations when they came up at school without having to go away from school, that was a pretty incredible experience for both of us. He's starting full-time at that school, at the beginning of this next school year, so we have all of our fingers and toes crossed that, that, that, that, that works out. But just so, so, so like the previous school that he went to when he went there in year seven. Year seven was a real wheels falling off moment for us because it's such a change from primary school to high school. The head of year seven, she was a wonderful woman, who tried really, really hard with him and helped shape his school experience quite a lot, it was very much like, I'll be waiting out the front of the school for you. If you can just get him to school, I'll take it from there. And even though it was with the absolute best of intentions, he learned pretty quickly that when he went to that school, the teachers, even the counselors, the main thing they were trying to do was get him back into that classroom. That was their main goal. They would give him 10 minute timeout, but that was only because then you go back into the classroom the lack of understanding of what was causing the problem, just meant that we were never going to get to a resolution there.

Louise Roger: 9:25

I think the big shift I noticed at this other school was, that they seem to be building a young person's awareness of self and what they could manage and what they can't manage, and helping them to develop strategies when they were feeling overwhelmed. But of course, this requires not only the young person to be aware of those strategies and to be aware of how they're feeling themselves. It also needs the adults around them to be receptive to that,

Tiffany Westphal: 9:58

Yeah.

Leisa Reichelt: 9:59

To take them seriously.

Louise Roger: 10:00

to take them seriously and not say just try harder.

Tiffany Westphal: 10:04

Or just to be simply attuned. so I'm just reflecting back on, you know, those Top 10 school-based stresses impacting School Can't from our, survey in December, 2022. And, um, the one at the very top was about safe people, having, uh, having safe people at school And then the next one was about people who could identify signs of distress. The next one was about the ability to communicate distress to the teacher. And the next one after is about, masking not feeling safe to share what's going on, or not having capacity to connect with my internal nervous system state and, and what my needs are as well. So masking can be a, product of not feeling safe, but it can also be a product of not having the skills to manage the situation any other way.

Leisa Reichelt: 10:57

Can we unpack this idea of safety? We keep talking about how kids need to feel safe at school. They're almost never going to come to physical harm at school. When we talk about this feeling safe at school, what actually do we mean?

Tiffany Westphal: 11:10

I'm so glad you asked. I wrote, something about this on LinkedIn yeah. So what, what's safety about I love the way Louise often says, safety is much more than a soft fall mulch. Often we think about physical safety, but we also need to think about psychological safety. We need to think about safety in a really broad sense. For me, safety at school is about, you know, it's about relationships, relationships between peers. it's about relationships between students and staff. about feeling competent and capable and able to do the work. Being able to access the curriculum, being able to demonstrate knowledge, be yourself and not having to mask or pretend. It's about having your support needs identified and responded to. Not being shamed for your difficulties, for any difficulties that you experienced due to your disability. It's about being met where you were at rather than where people wish you were at. It's about not having to work harder because of your disability. It's about being celebrated for who you are. It's about feeling like you'll, you know, what's going to happen next. So we know the predictability, feeling like things are predictable is important for feeling safe. It's about having enough energy available to meet the demands of the day. So knowing that, you know, I'm not going to be asked to do, many things that are beyond my capacity to manage for that day, that helps contribute to feeling safe. We know that sensory experiences that feel just right contribute to feeling safe. In actual fact, I was talking to Professor Dawn Adams about feeling safe and sensory experiences. And she was saying that there's some research that indicates that sensory experiences that are quite taxing are very difficult to bounce back from, to recover from, uh, compared to other stressful experiences. So that's really interesting. Being listened to, uh, having agency over things that cause you stress, that helps contribute to safety. Feeling okay about using the toilet or eating, you know, being able to tend to your physical needs at school. Being given enough time to share your ideas or complete work. So if you've got slow processing speed being able to manage those things. Being able to complete work in the same amount of time that it takes peers and not having to work longer and harder because of your disability to complete work. There are so many things. Little things like when the teacher says, can you get into groups to do this activity, and you're are left out all the time, that makes someone feel not safe. I can remember my daughter's first experience of not feeling safe at school had to do with reading. And she had a lot of difficulty learning to read. And the routine in the morning, every school day started the same where you came in, you got your readers out and the parent helpers in the room and you had to read to a parent helper and she felt really unsafe reading to people other than me or the teacher. That was a great source of, of stress for her that we had to manage. Can I just say safety at school's also about feeling like there are other people who get you and think you're awesome you know, lots of neurodivergent kids in particular tell me, but there's no one at school who gets me, or there's no one at school who shares my interest. There's no one at school at recess that I can talk about the history of, basketball or whatever.

Leisa Reichelt: 14:35

Yeah. When we think about physical safety, we think about being, you know, safe from physical harm. You've done a wonderful job of just unpacking all of the things that contribute to a sense of safety or lack of safety. But is there a way that we can talk about what psychological safety keeps you safe from?

Tiffany Westphal: 14:54

Safety is very diverse experience for people. My assessment of whether something's safe or not, whether something feels safe, doesn't matter. What matters is the individuals experience, their, their felt safety and whether they feel safe

Leisa Reichelt: 15:10

just trying to think about how, how do we help people to empathize with this a little more because like a broken leg is a broken leg and everyone's like, yep, that's definitely a broken leg. That definitely hurts, that needs this kind of treatment and to be taken with this amount of seriousness. Whereas I think every human being feels unsafe at some point, right? You're going to go do something that you've not done before. Most of us, we have to stand up in front of people and talk, don't feel particularly safe. Like so that feeling of lack of safety emotionally and psychologically is something that's quite familiar to us all. But I don't know whether we've experienced the equivalent of a psychological broken leg in the same way that a lot of these kids do. How do I differentiate between the impact of a lack of safety on a child who can't go to school compared to when I think about, you know, I might think about my past history. I go, well, I did something that wasn't comfortable, but I like screwed up my courage and I did it anyway and then I felt better afterwards. A lot of people experience that and they're like, well, well if, if you could just push through it and do it, you'll feel better on the other side. And actually that's not the experience for these kids in all of the cases.

Tiffany Westphal: 16:13

yeah. So what you're talking about is the difference between, an experience of not feeling safe that spurs some kind of action in order to resolve a situation. Stress is normal. We all experience stressful situations and have capacity to respond to them, but healthy amounts of stress are when you're able to resolve those situations relatively quickly, and they're not persistent. And I think what happens for lots of our young people in schools number one, they don't have agency to just decide not to go. So if they're experiencing chronic stress, they've often got no escape from it. They might have barriers to communicating about the experience of not feeling safe, or it might have always felt unsafe for them. And so, what we're seeing is students who are experiencing chronic states of feeling stressed at school or feeling unsafe at school. And they don't have the skills themselves or the resources themselves or the power or agency or capacity themselves to resolve those situations such that they feel safe or they're having to manage so many different stresses that their system becomes overwhelmed with the effort and it impacts their mental health, and their physical health in the, the labour of having to deal with such a significant stress load.

Leisa Reichelt: 17:36

So if you were somebody who was nervous about public speaking, it would be like having to public speak all day every day and it never feeling better.

Tiffany Westphal: 17:43

Yep.

Leisa Reichelt: 17:44

Lou's not convinced by my analogy. That's fine.

Louise Roger: 17:47

Yeah, public speaking not my favorite thing.

Tiffany Westphal: 17:50

you just hit a nerve with Lou

Louise Roger: 17:53

I prefer public singing.

Leisa Reichelt: 17:55

So we're going to somewhat awkwardly wrap up there. I hope there was something helpful or perhaps hopeful for you in today's conversation. If you are a parent or carer in Australia and are feeling distressed, remember you can call the Parent Helpline in your state. A link with the number to call is in the show notes. Also in the show notes, you'll find a link to the School Can't Australia community. You'll find a place to share your feedback with us and perhaps even volunteer to share your own School Can't experience with us on a future podcast. We would love to hear from you. And finally, please consider donating to School Can't Australia, your tax deductible donations assist us to raise community awareness, to partner with researchers, to produce resources like webinars and this very podcast which assist people who are supporting children and young people experiencing School Can't. Thanks again for listening, and we'll talk again soon. Take care.