ABSTRACT
Every teacher has at some stage faced the frustration of seeing a child who has been showing great improvement suddenly relapse or a child who is doing good work deliberately spoil it. This paper is an exploration of some of the difficulties children face when ‘getting better’ in an attempt to understand why this happens. To open, I would first like to give some illustrative vignettes from a school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Much of the material in this chapter comes from work in such a school although similar problems could well have occurred in mainstream schools.
