ABSTRACT
Everyone creates a narrative about their teaching – about children they have worked with and classes they have taught. In Emotionally Able people have tried to put together a narrative that will help teachers support the emotional well-being and mental health of children with severe and complex learning difficulties. Workshops where staff’s experiences of the emotional aspects of their work were explored and recorded were then developed into the Classroom Strategies. Based on an interlinked narrative around the emotional issues of individual children, people devised a way of identifying the issues that individual children were having through the Individual Profile of Emotional Well-Being. A discourse of deficits provides continuing escalating difficulties, whereas a discourse of competence, strength and resilience promotes the amplification of those very qualities. In fact, for many years their emotional needs were not even acknowledged but left out of the discourse.
