Bereavement and the supporting role of schools

Every time we hear about an untimely death of a parent or a child – the victim of a fatal car accident, say or of a heart attack or someone whose fight with an illness has been lost, our thoughts are very much with the surviving parent and the children who have lost a mother or a father.

We try to imagine the enormity of the loss; of the disappearance of the source of love; of the need to come to terms with the fact that life will never be the same. Some people have a strong extended family which gathers round. Others have a close network of friends who provide emotional and practical support but understanding and dealing with loss can be a lonely and bewildering business even for the best-supported.
According to Winston’s Wish (a remarkable charity which exists to support children who have lost a parent or a sibling, www.winstonswish.org.uk ) every 22 minutes a child in Britain is bereaved of a parent; this equates to 24,000 new children each year learning to live with a powerful range of confusing and conflicting emotions.

Bottled up, these emotions can have damaging consequences in later life for the individual, their family and society as a whole. Winston’s Wish has a range of services that include a national Helpline for anyone caring for or concerned about a bereaved child. Every year its Helpline supports around 3,500 families and professionals, benefiting an estimated 7,000 children.

Schools also have an important role to play in supporting children who have been bereaved. The familiar routine of school is in itself a consolation to the bereaved child whose life has ceased to be normal. At the same time, teachers and other staff in caring roles together with friends need to accept that bereaved children, especially adolescents, will have mood swings and periods where they challenge the importance of studying, of rules, of making much of an effort to look neat. This loss of drive and purpose is completely understandable and may also be accompanied by a sense of anger at the sibling or parent who has gone and resentment that they are now ‘different’ from their peers. The challenge for staff is to judge how much and for how long to tolerate sullen or uncooperative behaviour. Great patience and empathy are required when a child has retreated into herself and the barriers are hard to penetrate. Time, of course, is a healer, but ensuring that a child has grieved with the support of bereavement counselling is the most important thing to do. Good communication across the staff is vital so that, for example, Religious Studies and English teachers are mindful of the sensitivities associated with studying certain topics or texts but at the same time aware that these may provide a helpful vehicle for expressing emotions. On a more practical level, schools are adept at providing additional coaching to catch up work and writing to the examination boards to seek special consideration for their candidate.

Schools also need to support the friends of someone who has experienced a bereavement, and on rare but tragic occasions to cope with the death of a current pupil. Friends can be the mainstay of someone’s emergence from grief, their loyalty being a source of hope, but the friends need the discreet support of the pastoral staff in handling their friend and her mood swings. Friends can sometimes be the ones to alert staff to worrying behaviour – bleak thoughts posted on Facebook, for example, but they must also not feel guilty if they need to detach themselves from the bereaved friend and get on with their own lives. They will be more use to her this way.

When the whole school is involved in a tragedy, staff and pupils will invariably be magnificent in thinking and acting with moving sensitivity, reaching out to the extended family, being resourceful too. Depending on what has happened the support needs to extend to the months ahead and it can be some time before life is back to anything resembling normal. Although no one would ever wish for such tragedies they bind the community together, reaffirm our humanity and remind everyone of a school’s role to give hope even in the face of grief and adversity.