 Hello and welcome to Pukipondas, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. Today's question is, how can we enable teenagers to make sense of an uncertain world? And I'm in conversation with Claire Ward and Jamie Galpin. Yes, I'm Claire Ward. I'm a speech and language therapist and CBT practitioner. I'm part of Special Networks, which is a group of therapists and educators who work with families and young people in schools. I started my life as a speech and language assistant in a school for children with specific learning difficulties. So there's sort of dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and then went off and did my training and I had a kind of learning disability background really. I was there for about 15 years and then I moved back into mainstream. I've kind of gone full circle really. And I'm a kind of hybrid. Everything I do these days is a mixture of my speech and language background, but also taking on all the stuff I'm doing with CBT. Jamie. Hi there, yes. My name is Jamie Galpin. I'm a developmental psychologist and I also work as part of Special Networks. I'm also an education officer at Mason. I sort of began my work around sort of the field of SCN, working as a one-to-one teaching assistant within a school throughout my sort of postgraduate studies. So I initially studied modern languages and then moved into developmental psychology after attending a kind of talk given by a feminist literary theorist who is looking at how children understand gender stereotypes and I thought this is brilliant. If we can find out how children understand things, we can find out how adults understand things. So I then went on to study developmental psychology and did a masters in research and education as well because I was particularly interested in putting theory into practice, being sort of working in a school and up until just the end of last year I was also based within a multi-academy trust, one where Clara and I actually first met each other in London. Yes, so that's sort of me. The episode question today is, how can we enable teenagers to make sense of an uncertain world? And I wondered if you would maybe make a start on that Jamie and perhaps hand over to Clara at a relevant moment. Yes, so this really is the sort of premise of the work that Clara and I have been doing over the last sort of four or five years in terms of practice is obviously the subject of the book that we're speaking about today. This idea of kind of uncertainty and our ability to manage uncertainty. I think in terms of making sense of an uncertain world, it would be more about embracing that uncertainty. We can't necessarily avoid that uncertainty. It's inherent in the tapestry of life. You know, it's naturally uncertain. What we've got to do is learn to live with it, learn to manage it. So it's about recognizing the difficulties we all experience with uncertainty and finding ways to increase our capacity to manage it and potentially reduce the extent to which we experience it. There are certain areas where we can bring a little bit more certainty into our lives and ultimately what we're looking to do, certainly from a practitioner perspective, is to empower teenagers to utilize certain strategies around managing uncertainty. We look specifically at three areas of uncertainty. So yes, the world's an uncertain place, but there are three particular areas of uncertainty that we focus on. And that's structural uncertainty, sensory uncertainty, and social uncertainty. And it's about identifying what's causing us uncertainty in those domains and then trying to think of ways around managing that. What would you add there? I think the most important thing in all of this is exactly, as Jamie said, recognizing the things we can't control. And I think that's a really important first step when trying to support teenagers. I think understanding that. I mean, a lot of what I do would be called psychoeducation. So helping teenagers understand why they might be feeling anxious, why they might be feeling socially anxious, but actually my kind of area is what could get called social communication difficulties, but actually things we all experience. And I think absolutely learning to control what I can control and learning to accept what I can't is kind of the first step. I don't know whether it's useful to take you through perhaps some of the work I might do in each of those areas so that people get an idea of what we're talking about. That would be useful. In the three S's, do you mean? Yeah. Those structural sensory and social, yeah. It'd be great to learn a little bit more about each of those areas. Yeah. And just get a sense of the people that we're talking about. So I think the main thing that I try and do when I'm working, whether it's with a school or a family or a young person is help them to understand that a lot of the behaviors that we don't understand in the people around us come from a search for certainty. That's really where an awful lot of these things come from. And then once we've done that, and these will naturally split into the three areas, but we start by asking this question, where's the uncertainty? So we look for children that might be struggling as a result of structural uncertainty, sensory uncertainty and social uncertainty. So it's not always clear where the uncertainty is coming from, but we know it's in one of those three areas. So for example, if I was working with somebody who, well, I am working with somebody who's very anxious in school. And what we found has helped her in terms of understanding the structures of the day, for example, are, and this is familiar to lots of people, giving her more information, so increasing the knowledge she has and increasing the control that she has over herself, if you like. So in terms of structure, she might need more information about changes that are coming up or when homework is going to be set, or a revision timetable gone through with her. And this gives her a sense of kind of control over what's about to happen. In terms of her sensory uncertainty, she might be experiencing difficulties with sensory regulation. So she might be overwhelmed by certain things in the classroom or unable to focus because there's a new noise. She might have a real need to fidget. We hear about this a lot, obviously. And giving her an understanding of why she does these things can be really helpful, as well as giving her sort of tools and techniques to help her manage those times. And then, so again, this student I've got in mind is very socially anxious. So understanding why she might feel socially anxious, why this teenage time is particularly difficult, as we can start to compare ourselves to other people in preparation for joining a new tribe as we leave our family, all that kind of thing. So understanding her knowledge of why this is happening. And then giving her a little bit of control, like I said, talking about what you can and can't control in social situations. And you can do lots of work around. It's not just discussion where we do practical work as well. We do build some skills around the first time you meet somebody perhaps on an interview. But acknowledging that we can't prepare for every single social interaction that we're going to come across. So does that give you a sort of sense of the kind of work we do and why it splits nicely into those three areas? Yeah, I guess I'm interested to go even back a step. And maybe this is a Jamie question, but you said that this all stems from the fact that we're always sort of searching for certainty. And I just wondered why? It's a massive question. I appreciate that. But yeah, why do we look for certainty? So there's some kind of quite nice sort of new theories or kind of stories around cognition that are out there at the moment. They've been out there for a long time, but they're reaching kind of, I suppose, sort of practical consciousness now. And one of those is this idea of predictive processing, this understanding that the way that we see and interact with the world isn't how we maybe have previously thought that we were kind of more reactive in our interaction with the world that we would sort of sit and wait to have information come to us. So through our eyes, through our ears, we would then put those bits of information together in our brain and then experience something. Instead of the recognition that actually what we are probably doing and what we must be doing is really kind of predicting what we're going to be experiencing, because it's not a very efficient way of interacting with the world to have that sort of passive response to wait for information to come to me to then experience something. And it also can't really be the way that we interact with the world, otherwise we would have these sort of constant little surprises and shocks of going, oh, look, there's a chair, there's a computer, there's the shed. Instead, we're sort of carrying around these models of the world that enable us to predict what might be happening. And it's a much more adaptive way to go about things. So, you know, if I'm about to stand up, I really need to be able to kind of predict what my body might need at the moment I stand up in terms of adjusting my blood pressure, so that when I do stand up, I don't fall over and faint. So I need to be able to preempt that or predict where I'm going to be. And that prediction can also make me very efficient in my interactions with the world, essentially. It means that I can kind of preempt what I'm going to experience and adapt myself accordingly. So, you know, if it's snowing outside, I can anticipate the fact it's going to be cold and put an extra coat on. And that means that I'm going to be maintaining my most efficient state. So rather than going outside and then shivering and getting really, really cold, I'm going to be able to go outside and maintain that core body temperature. And that's essentially the fundamental driver of us as a biological organism is to be energy efficient. Because like any other kind of biological creature, we're resource rational. What that means is we're trying to be as efficient as possible with our resources and our central resource is metabolic. It's energy. So, you know, once we run out of energy, we essentially die. So really what we're trying to do is not run out of energy. You know, our brains trying to help us out by saying, look, I'm going to try and keep you within certain parameters that make you as energy efficient as possible. And that means maintaining a core body temperature, making sure that you're kind of not thirsty, making sure that you're not hungry. And any time I'm in a situation that's uncertain, it means there's a potential threat to that energy efficiency. So, you know, I don't necessarily know what's going on right now. I don't know kind of the state I'm in, and therefore I don't know if I need to act. I don't know if I need to do something. Do I need to run away? Do I need to fight this thing in front of me? And so I'm stuck in that sort of state of limbo. I've kind of got my foot on the brake and the accelerator at the same time, which is not the most energy efficient way of operating. And in a way, you can kind of think that that kind of physiological drive to move away from being in that place can be reflected at that psychological level that we just don't like being there, don't like being stuck in that uncertainty, because it means we just don't know what to do. And we can't sustain it. You know, I can't sit here with my foot on the brake and the accelerator for any extended period of time, because in the end, I'll run out of energy. And that's the end of me, which means my brain hasn't really done its central job of keeping me alive. That makes sense. But that strikes me as a universal need then, that need for certainty. And I wonder with your three S's that you talk about and these ideas that how we can introduce more certainty or address uncertainty in those areas. Why was it that you picked them for your book? And we must talk properly about the books. So I'm holding it up for anyone on the podcast, which is really unhelpful, but anyone who's watching can see the Andy Artie workbook. But this is geared specifically at teens who learn differently. So why did you pick them? Because it does strike me that what you're talking about is somewhat universal. I don't know, Claire, if you maybe wanted to talk about. Why is it written for teens? Well, we had to write it for someone, I think is the answer. You know, really, I think we did like to call it, you know, supporting all humans in every situation. But I guess from a kind of marketing point of view, that's kind of harder to sell, being a bit flippant. I mean, we did, we had to choose somewhere because I think to narrow it down helps with understanding, because we can give really specific examples. But we do think this applies to everybody. We think it applies across the board. I mean, I spent nearly 30 years listening to people argue the toss on diagnosis. Should someone go for a diagnosis, you know, what benefits will it bring? It might unlock some funding or something, but you know, it's a really complicated business diagnosis. And actually, I suppose what we're saying, I mean, this all came about because I was looking for an approach that was a little bit more transdiagnostic. So it wasn't specifically written for people with autism or autistic or someone with a diagnosis of ADHD or dyslexia. And what I found as a publisher saying, well, there isn't one, why don't you write it? Which was, well, in the long run, quite helpful. It wasn't quite the quick fix I was looking for. But this does literally, we think, apply across the board and you can take our framework. And I think we can use it in early years. You can use it in, you know, I'm using it with my university students and young adults. And what we're saying is that it's not just people with any kind of diagnosis or who learn differently that benefit from support in this way. But you can apply it to all of us. I mean, I use it in my parenting. I use it to look at situations when I find things difficult. It is a truly universal approach, we think. And it's quite straightforward. And why is it so powerful to move away from a diagnosis approach? Is that because there are issues with getting diagnosis or is it that you actually just don't think the diagnosis is helpful? What's your sort of motivations and thinking there? It's probably for a longer discussion. But we know for a start that there's unequal access to diagnosis. There are families who've been on waiting lists for years. And diagnosis brings us a description of what that person finds difficult. It doesn't give us a reason and it doesn't necessarily point us in the right direction for the kind of support somebody needs. Now, we're not saying that we're completely anti-diagnosis and there's certainly people who found it really helpful because it's helped them understand themselves better and they felt there's a lot of blame around difference and it can really be helpful in those situations. But it sets you apart. If you're a teacher in a classroom with loads of children and you find out that a child that doesn't fit maybe and has a diagnosis, there's a temptation. Obviously not everyone feels this but there's a temptation so they're doing that because of their diagnosis. Now, they're not. They're doing it because they're struggling with something but their diagnosis isn't necessarily going to help you work out what that is or provide for you a sort of route map to help them. I don't know. Jamie will have something else to say, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, when we talk of the title we've got there, you know, teens who learn differently. It's essentially all teens. The point we're making in the book is everybody learns differently. You know, the fundamental principle is where we talk about the kind of inherent variability and thinking that unifies us all. You know, none of us sees the world in exactly the same way. Again, we sort of talk about that from that predictive processing perspective. You know, we build our worlds based on statistical regularity so always experiencing cold when it's snowing it builds a model for me of having snow and cold but for other people who've maybe experienced different things I might perceive the world slightly differently and that's not to say it's a disordered or dysfunctional version of the world. You know, my prediction making machine is working just the same as yours but I've just got different weightings in terms of the input that I'm putting in there that have led to these different sorts of perceptions and I think that the focus on that universal was also recognition from our practice of the sort of explosion of acronyms that parents and professionals have to try and navigate through within our kind of field I suppose and increasingly looking particularly at practitioners it can as Claire was saying lead to that creation of a kind of distance that barrier to empathy that this person's not like me because they have this label and I might feel that I can't empathize with them because I'm not dyslexic so how can I understand what they might be dealing with or what they might be managing and what we're trying to do is bring everything back into the realm of the universal and also deep pathologize things to show that point that different ways of thinking they're not psychologically abnormal they're kind of natural responses to different situations that anybody would experience so again Claire's point there around looking at sort of behaviors or difficulties that children are experiencing reframing it in terms of that uncertainty seeing that behavior that we might identify as being a problem and realize for that individual it's not a problem it's a solution to a problem not necessarily the best solution but it's my solution and that fundamental problem is uncertainty and so again it goes back to kind of what we're trying to do is find out where's that uncertainty regardless of a diagnosis you know different diagnostic labels can potentially highlight how certain individuals may be more prone to experience uncertainty particularly if you know the environment that's been created for me hasn't considered different strengths that I might have but really it's coming back to still saying you know the fundamental difficulty is uncertainty and we can all empathize with that particularly given the circumstances of the previous year we're probably all a little bit better at understanding that uncertainty and that undercurrent of uncertainty that a lot of teenagers carry around with them in non-pandemic times we've all carried that with us over the past year and hopefully can empathize even more effectively with children young people we're working with Yes it's something that I think I find really interesting at the moment both children and adults were seeing this you know completely understandable uptick in anxiety which is often a completely appropriate proportionate response to an objectively really challenging uncertain time but one of the things I kind of noticed and noted I suppose in my work is that I'm having to work with lots of people who are experiencing kind of anxiety that's impacting day to day who haven't experienced that before so many of us who are seasoned pros that are struggling with anxiety we've got a toolbox we've been there you know we've got the t-shirt and we have got some ideas about how to manage it and I wondered how you know your book is coming out at a time when anxiety is a much bigger and more talked about topic than it ever has been before which you can't possibly have known which but yeah I just wondered how it's being received and how your work maybe is changing in like the pandemic plan Shall I go first? Yeah I think what's really nice is that even before this people were starting to get it and I think yeah Jamie's points about you know empathy is a really massive one the best comment I've had so far was I'm already finding her less annoying which I think is literally if that's all I ever get from a teacher that'll do in general people really like it I think partly as Jamie said because everybody's experienced this a little bit more and so when we're you know talking to teachers or parents or young people you know everyone's on the same page about what this can do to us I think that people like it because it's simple you know with you know the frameworks really the question is really straightforward the framework's not very complicated and it doesn't mean throwing everything else out and starting with something new you know a lot of the things people are doing and a lot of the ways people are thinking fit into this really nicely it's not saying you know you've got to stop that reading program or you've got to you know use this social communication program it all fits already it all fits into the into this framework which I think is useful for people because I think now is not the time to take on new and complicated things and it doesn't mean can you just talk through like a really sort of maybe sort of typical example of what it might look like in practice some of the ideas yes so I suppose well it's interesting I was helping a leadership team support a couple of teachers who were really struggling in lockdown and we literally got a piece of paper and we wrote the three s's so structure sensory social on a piece of paper and went through this teacher's working week and we looked at where there might be structural uncertainty so the fact that meetings were moving you know a great deal more than they used to in terms of sensory there was an awful lot of this is in school there was an awful lot of feedback because they were having to run lessons online as well as actually in the classroom and they were struggling to manage that kind of interaction of the two and there was an awful lot of sort of technical difficulties that were making it harder for her to manage her sort of sensory imbalances if you like and then socially we talked to an awful lot about how she's managing meetings and how she is putting in a structure that other people were finding hard to follow if that makes sense and I know that's broadening out and taking it away from teenagers a little bit maybe another one for anxious teenagers and I think I said a little bit before but you know having an understanding that what we're looking for what we're looking for is a balance between either the teenager having all the control or the school having all the control and I know a lot of schools are struggling with students who are finding it hard to come back into school having been away and very much on their own timetable and suddenly there's this overwhelming right I've got to be on someone else's timetable and schools are reacting in different ways so some are going all out and saying no we need you in your uniform on time for full full week of lessons and others are backing right off and saying that's fine you come in whenever you want to and what we know is that most of us need a bit of both so balance between really nice predictable repeated structures that we can really rely on and then that sense of agency and that sense of control within it so what we would say to a school in that situation would be well why not say we need you to come in for half a day in the first instance but you can choose when that half day is or you can come in but you can wear your own clothes or you know whatever it is it's about getting that balance between what we control and what other people control and learning to function within that and in terms of sensory support I think people are becoming much more familiar with this idea of sensory under and over sensitivities so you know that the children who need perhaps a quarter and less exciting visual environment to learn well or who need movement breaks or you know fidget toys or whatever it is but I think there's this sense of interception which people are becoming more familiar with which is being able to really interpret internal changes as needs so whether you need the toilet have a drink eat something or emotions so how am I feeling but also a sense of what yeah what am I feeling what am I thinking and I'm working with someone at the moment who finds choice really really hard and that extends to everything so what she wants to eat what she might want to do you know when she leaves college and equally which friends which of the other students in college does she like you know she's got such difficulty interpreting her kind of gut instincts if you like that she's finding all choices really really hard to make so we're starting right back at the beginning and we're helping her become more aware of her body so we do walking where she's focusing on feeling her sock moving her shoe if you like and then we'll move you know as you that's the beginning of the programme and then you might move on to being more aware of emotional responses and thoughts that then help you and this moves into the social realm then might help you make social judgments so how can you tell if someone's being friendly towards you does that make you feel good well might that indicate that that would be a good friend you know that that kind of work and does that give you a sort of sense of applies yeah absolutely and I think one of the questions I guess I then find myself wondering is if I'm a teaching assistant or a parent or someone and I'm thinking this is beginning to make sense and I can perhaps see some of these kind of potential issues challenges that we might address in my child or even in myself like how do I go about beginning to unpick that and recognise where the genuine challenges are because I think sometimes and maybe this goes with that idea of labelling that sometimes we think we know what the answer is but we might be prejudging so for example if we were working with a child who we need to be autistic we might make assumptions that you know social issues might be a particularly overriding one here but actually it might be that for that child that's not the do you sort of mean like how do we make the right judgments here and how do we ask the right questions how do we explore it in a meaningful objective way I know what Jamie's going to say so I'll let him say it yeah I mean you know it's exactly sort of just reiterating the point earlier about you know the diagnosis as you say you know the function of that as with everything is driven by that need to kind of extinguish the uncertainty if we've got a student who's struggling the diagnosis can potentially give us certainty it can make us feel like okay they've done that because of this but actually it's a it's a it's a false sense of certainty because those labels are simply circular re-descriptions of the same problem so you know if a child has got a kind of different attentional focus or struggling to pay attention we might say oh they're doing that because they have ADHD but ADHD is really just a description of children who struggle with attention so you've essentially said you know that child struggling to pay attention because they're struggling to pay attention it doesn't get to the bottom of okay where's it coming from that's when you go back to well it's coming from uncertainty rather than looking at a blank piece of paper saying whoa what it could be anywhere the point about the model is you force yourself to look in each of those three areas and that's to avoid those confirmation biases that you were talking about that we think okay well this is an autistic child and therefore they're avoiding those busy crowds because of the social uncertainty because of that thinking through someone else's mind but by forcing yourself to look say also it's so sensory you might say well actually I know that they have an aversion to light touch and actually in a crowded environment you're more susceptible to light touch someone could brush against you or brush past you and so it's recognizing that that could potentially be what's motivating my resistance towards going there that uncertainty that light touch can bring you know because it's potentially kind of triggering a kind of a survival response you know light touch normally means something's about to sting me or bite me so it makes sense to get out of the way and make you feel uncomfortable but we learn that in lots of situations that doesn't happen but for some children young people I might not be there yet so that's sort of why we constantly throw out the books say you know make sure you're looking at all three areas and then it's about working together with the young person with the kind of team to say okay well which one should we target first which one do we think okay this one is where we think it's possibly coming from let's put support in there and then see what we've got left and really the book starts by talking about structure because usually that is the easiest one to go for and certainly the one over which we have the most as people supporting have the most immediate control and you know Claire's points earlier they're really important that often we can think about removing all structure as a sense of giving somebody more freedom but that's an additional burden and again you've removed any kind of stability from the environment there's nothing to fall back on now it's on me every day to hold the world together to make things happen and so each day that pressure is going to increase that I've got to kind of make the world work you know it's quite a fragile and vulnerable position to be in if I've got no structure and it's up to me each day to make the world make sense that's a lot of pressure isn't it and how do you help then if you're working with for example a looked after child where their world might feel quite chaotic and there might be you know even more uncertainty for them and there might be for other children right now and what do we do we control what we can or is it about learning to sit with what we can't which bit there is more important do you like to elaborate on that sorry although that was I mean I think recognising the degree of uncertainty is absolutely the most important thing and then sharing that and sharing that with the young person I think fundamentally I mean obviously it depends on their kind of developmental stage and I mean I think that the idea is with younger children you would work to kind of help the people who look after them to understand where it all comes from but my impression is that towards the end of primary and into secondary you can start explaining it really quite kind of explicitly to young people saying look this is something everybody struggles with none of us like it when uncertainty when we have to deal with uncertainty but you know getting we can't get rid of it and some people say you know I'll be working with somebody and I'll say so you know what would if I could wave a magic wand what would we do here and they say we'll get rid of my anxiety and I'd say no I can't do that and they'll say well why not and I'll say well you'd probably get run over on your way home you know why do you need that anxiety about understanding that we can't take it all away but there are some things we can do to help you manage it and it might be and I think Jamie's right you know we always start with structure do you know what's going to happen and when within reason you know can you hold the information we're expecting you to hold in terms of you know daily routines or even where you are in the day or in the week or in the term you know do you have that information because we know that these points you know why do we have phones with all this information in it because information makes us feel more certain so making sure people have access to information about what's going on Callan does a brilliant I know people have post-it notes for all the things that need to happen certainly for kids who struggle with personal care or you know showering or whatever right this is what's going to happen this evening on post-it you get to choose what order we do it in and you put you know reorder those post-it notes so that you get the evening you want but these things are going to happen they're non-negotiable you know making I think it helps people feel held and the sensory stuff I think people although some people are getting a lot more familiar I think maybe that is slightly harder but you know for sensitive caregivers will know what things their child really loves and what things they find really difficult so whether it's you know heat or pressure or certain types of movement making sure those happen on a regular basis you know nice predictable outings to the part where you can just sit on that swing you know that linear regular repetitive movement that we know or trampolini is the other great one that we know bring a lot of sensory certainty building that in and social I think it's really you know we put it last because and there's actually more on social I think in terms of activities in the book and it's worth saying you know we have put a load of activities one of the reasons the book is the size it is I suppose you can lift it no one of the reasons we wanted it to be like that is because we wanted to put in lots and lots of examples of some of the things we do that helps either build certainty or help people tolerate uncertainty help people manage it and I suppose it's worth saying that most of the activities are kind of ideas for schools but there's no reason why you can't a lot of them can't transfer home so I hope it's kind of pick and mix from them oh my goodness absolutely and I'm we're suggesting it very much as a kind of pick and mix book there's a very important page which is how to use this book and we're very explicit there that you could sit and read the whole thing from cover to cover but we wouldn't necessarily advise it because well I can't read a book it in a sort of logically from beginning to end a workbook obviously you can if you want but we've done some fairly clear we hope sign posting so that you know are you somebody trying to understand a child's behavior is this young person really confusing you and then look at certain chapters there's a lovely introduction with you know really manageable way of understanding all the sort of theory behind it that Jamie was explaining at the beginning and then each of the sections on structure sensory and social start with a little bit of theory and then go straight into you know literally sheets where you can you know fill in behaviors or or you know try and understand that that behavior more easily and then lots of activities really that you can adapt I mean the idea is to be creative because once you know where the uncertainties coming from it kind of puts you in a better position for what to do about it yeah I think one is I particularly like about the you know book you've created in the content there is that it enables really kind of constructive and curious conversations which I think is is is super helpful I think there's lots in there that's really practical and really actionable which is great but actually I think for me almost even more important I've used a couple of bits with my daughter it's just that the conversations it enabled that were perhaps didn't go where either of us might have expected or could have taken them without those prompts which I yeah I thought was really helpful I wonder Jamie if you could talk a little bit about how your kind of starting point as a teaching assistant maybe fed into this because for me this is like a perfect thing for a teaching assistant or other member of support staff who might be working with a nurture group or one-to-one with a child for example and it felt like now that you've said that you had a background as a teaching assistant I thought ah okay but yeah I wonder if you could talk to that moment well I mean it was a you know just that recognition that a lot of the children young people I was working with had those similar kind of needs I suppose it was and that sort of recognition came about through reflecting on what I was bringing what was my value there and more often than not the function I was providing was certainty so either structural certainty so they'd look to me to find out what was happening next and what what was being expected of them or social so look to me to support and navigate around interaction with peers or interaction with teachers or century look to me to sort of support them to regulate to go for a break to go for a walk to do those things so it was realizing that really my function was just to provide some certainty and so it was then saying well you know I can very easily be replaced by you know a stress scale or a mini whiteboard you know it's a big hit to the ego when you realize that but you can then realize that actually you know what I'm trying to do and what you're hoping to do is really make yourself redundant you're trying to put yourself out of a job and you're saying and it was in striving towards that that I tried to distill down well what is it that I'm actually doing what apart from being a super wonderful amazing person what am I actually providing what's the function of me to this young person and so that's when it started looking at that and I think you know certainly working predominantly with autistic children young people and then particularly you know you know higher needs people so those who may be minimally verbal you know that sort of model really stands out the structure sensory social and you know you can see overlaps with traditional areas of difference that a clinician might be looking at but it was then looking at all the other children young people I worked with and then just looking more broadly at all humans that you realize well actually this is somewhere where all finding difficulties and those two ways out of it the clear mention that knowledge or control and you know that's I was trying to then increase that knowledge and increase that control give them independence over those strategies so they're not relying on me as much and again in terms of the function of the book you know we wanted it to have the theory as well as the practical worksheets because there's no single worksheet that we can say oh this will work for all children young people the idea was that sort of adage of you know you give someone a fish and they can eat for a day you give them a net and they're often eating all the time the idea with the book was that yes we've got some quick you know you can jump to it photocopy some resources get that done but if you've got time to reflect we're telling you the kind of what's underpinning these things to then empower people to then be able to kind of take a step back realize behaviors that may have initially appeared irrational that they're logical they make sense the function of those behaviors is to generate certainty you know if you're looking at a child and you're saying well why are they trying to you know I'm particularly a child who may be struggling and responds really badly to praise so you know you're trying to sort of pump them up and you're giving them praise and it looks like they're aggressing towards you looks like they're looking for a fight but I'm looking for certainty I've got a perception of myself that I'm worthless and useless and terrible you're challenging that by telling me I'm not I'd rather move towards a certainty of no this is who I am terrible useless and horrible I'm going to make you reinforce that or again interactions with peers kids that can look like they're just not trying and again it's that need for control because of the uncertainty of if I interact with these people say I tell a joke maybe they'll laugh maybe they won't maybe they'll walk away maybe they'll kind of ignore me but if I kind of swear at them or shouted them or push them I know that I did that that was my control I'll know now exactly why I got this response so it's again that idea of putting me in control and the current situation again is hopefully highlighted that to people that we all have that exaggerated need for control in situations of uncertainty so the pandemic you know we either won't acknowledge so we're kind of endlessly about the pandemic trying to kind of knowledge our way out of uncertainty or we had that exaggerated need for control so we went out and bought all the toilet paper we could find in a way to try to exert a sense of control over this situation but again the function of it was to seek certainty and so our job is to say where's the uncertainty well it's a lot taken board and final question quite so I will ask you just to share final thoughts as we wrap up in a moment but just a final question for me to Claire before we do that is it's really notable and noteworthy that what you created is something which enables anyone like complete non specialist there's no knowledge in this area to intervene and support a child or young person or indeed adult that they care about and I'm interested in why you did that and how that kind of sit with you know you're someone both of you people who've trained for many years to do what you do and you're handing tools over to people anybody to do this and it feels possible for anybody to do this and I just yeah wonder what your kind of thoughts were on that it's not always something people have had to do yeah which doesn't make any sense to me I suppose partly because I wanted families to be able to read it and take it on and do it themselves but also you know increasingly what I do you know I'm now outside the NHS and the work that I do is really it's become very kind of creative I mean it's everybody's creative because we're coming up with new solutions all the time but it's become harder for me to get into schools because people are squeezed on funding and squeezed on time and squeezed on all resources including staff and you know the best work I've ever done has been working alongside really really sound teaching assistants and then slowly slowly withdrawing and watching them take on the work and you know I think they're really undervalued and I think it was really important to me that literally you know a mum or a sister or a teaching assistant or a care assistant could just have access to all this theory that doesn't always kind of get shared across the board but would also find it I just like things that make sense and I like things that aren't too complicated so that's probably where it came from but I'm really delighted that you think anyone could pick it up and use it and I'm really delighted that you used a couple of bits I mean early feedback the book hasn't actually quite out yet and I'm really looking forward to the conversations with people who are taking it out there into the field trying activities you know seeing what works seeing what doesn't and so I'm really happy you said that but I just think it's important that everybody gets you know fair access to this that's good and it's yeah certainly something I feel really strongly about but haven't always been met now at this point in my career it's met well but what perhaps earlier on in my career not so much Jamie yeah and I think it goes back again to that idea of trying to make yourself redundant and and also deep pathologizing things bringing it back into that realm of the universal you know just the mere existence of professionals or specialists implies there's something that you need to be a specialist in so straight away the fact that there is a you know Claire and I worked for years in the specialist autism support service and just our sheer existence suggested that there was a realm of knowledge outside of that which ordinary teachers might hold and what we were trying to say is no you know those fundamental skills that you use as a practitioner are going to be useful for everybody and that's that passion, creativity and ultimately empathy and so it's again trying to remove those barriers to empathy to to help you know promote that greater understanding by highlighting you know that we are all different and where we draw a line between disordered and not disordered it's a political and social choice not a scientific one you know that there's no clear delineations between different ways of thinking and recognizing as well that you know differences or struggles that children young people might have that are going to be natural expressions of that different way of thinking you know difficulties with reading or differences in attention or focus it's not a developmental failure it's a normal individual difference that somebody might have and we're really just trying to kind of reiterate that to say you know if you're a human you have the ability to understand other humans and it's just putting it back into that context and there maybe what you become specialist in rather than a particular disorder or label is in the individual child with whom you're working and I guess that's something that the book does enable you to really do and I think that perhaps is what you brought as a teaching assistant wasn't it you became an absolute specialist in this child with whom you're from absolutely what thoughts would you like to close with I always think that the end of a book cast is a moment to leave people with thoughts to take out into the world what would you like to close with Jamie when you're going to come I suppose it's again I just going back to kind of that point that you know the understanding other people understanding other humans means understanding that kind of unity in our diversity and our diversity in that unity you know the natural differences in thinking that unifies all that there's no such thing as a kind of normal person and you know if we shift away from that then those kind of unique attributes that we all have can then stop being reframed as inadequacies or deficiencies because we step away from that unachievable endeavor of trying to teach or support the non-existent normal person Claire what thought would you like to leave people with that's not really my thought but I've become really interested in a branch of CBT called acceptance and commitment therapy and the question that they ask is are you willing to experience all these difficult thoughts feelings memories that we all have to experience in order to do what's important to you and it's something that I'm using increasingly certainly with older people and I think God if I've got any wish for this book it's that people understand that it is part of life experiencing difficulty whether you're a child a young person a teacher a parent you know all of us but being willing to experience those difficulties and obviously building in whatever we can to make them manageable is really important if we're going to keep moving in the direction that we want to move in.