 Okay, so I'm here in Dubai, in Dubai, with Gareth Morwood, who had we actually met before? I don't think so. I think we've only actually physically met this week, or we've been doing this conference out here, although we've been in touch a lot and it's very exciting, yeah. So yeah, so here we are in Dubai, landing by the pool. And we thought we would catch up and I would grab a bit of your expertise. So I came to one of your sessions at the conference that we've been out here for. We're not just on holiday. Really, right? We're working hard here, you know. We really aren't. So I came to your session and it was about kind of low arousal and kind of managing, challenging behaviour and that sort of thing. It'd be really good to get a bit of, yeah, advice from you. But first of all, maybe if you could tell the people who you are. Yeah, so ultimately I'm a senco in a secondary school, a preschool school in Stockholm. I've been doing that for quite a while now, pushing up 20 years, I think. And the long and short bit is we're very inclusive schools. We've always had young people with many complex needs and disabilities, mainstream, comprehensive school. And over the last couple of years, I've been lucky to do quite a bit of research with colleagues at the University of Manchester looking at autism in mainstream settings and more complex needs. And from January, so literally just about a month in, I've been really fortunate to be working 40% of my time with Professor Andy McDonald on the Studio 3, developing educational packages based on their lower arousal approach. So what is the lower arousal approach? What does that even mean? So in the essence, Andy sort of founded this approach where he's looking at how you'd work with young people with self-injurious behaviors, behaviors of concern in complex settings in using non-restrictive practices. So it's looking at environment, emotional regulation, and understanding how we work with individuals, also the carers of those individuals, whether the parents, the carers, or the people that are professionals working with them. And my view is that this can work in those complex clinical settings with young people who have quite high levels of dysregulation. We can develop and draw on some of those key things for school settings. So the idea, this is kind of like the ultimate inclusion, I guess, isn't it? You're managing to keep everyone engaged and managing within a mainstream environment. I think it's very easy now for people to say we can't meet need or that child can't come to my school because, and we've always had the view really, well, you should come to our school, how can we? And I think changing that around one of my good friends, Ellie Chappell, talks about this flip the narrative. So we're changing the view about saying, how can we? And in doing that, developing strategies that help everybody because any strategy for a child with SCN or a complex disability or a different need actually doesn't harm children who don't have those needs. So what does that look like then? I mean, how do you make it work? So in essence, I think we've got to start with ourselves. I think understanding our own stress and our own levels of arousal is so important when you work with others. I think too often school systems are just looking at the end product, the child, the parents, the carers, the other staff, et cetera. We've got to think about ourselves first. Another key factor is our environment. The emotional regulation within the environment, the physical environment, the emotional environment, the social environment, the communication environment are all key. And we wrote quite a lot about this in our paper, Main Streaming Autism Making It Work, which was published in 2011, looking at those environmental factors as a core part. So what does the environment need to look like in order to make this work? I think there's several elements to this. The physical environment is one element of it. I think the structure and the social environment is really important. But the key thing with this work is the look and the understanding about emotional regulation and the emotional environment. I think you can go into some schools and feel the charged nature of things. And you can feel the tension sometimes in the air and it's about understanding how we create a calm, purposeful and focused educational environment. And that makes a difference having that kind of calm feeling when you walk in rather than this charged, fuzzy. Absolutely. And if you think you may have extrasensory needs or you may react to that charged environment more, if it's calm, focused, purposeful, you're in a good place to learn. And ultimately, nobody fights or runs when they're calm and relaxed and it's about just making sure that we've got that opportunity to build environments and learning sessions around a purposeful way of working. So what you're saying basically then is let's take the most tricky kids because we love them but they're tricky, right? And then we're going to say we'll try and teach them in a mainstream setting let's keep it really calm. I mean, that's quite a lot to ask, though. It is. And I think that's why people don't do it because it's hard, you know. And you get it wrong, you know. And I think it's very easy when something happens a blowout, a meltdown, an explosion, whatever people use these terms for, where it goes wrong or whether dysregulation is evident to then just simply say, well, we can't do that. That's an exclusion or you're not allowed to come to our school anymore. Rather than those tough conversations about how can we modify and change and personalise the environment and the education we offer for that individual within our setting. So another colleague of mine, Dr Damian Milton, talks about this idea of personalisation, not normalisation. And I think schools that aren't inclusive are trying to normalise individuals within systems. Okay. And actually what you need to do is try and craft the environment so it suits that individual. Absolutely. I'm a pathway through it. You know, so actually some of our learners need some time just to have that a social time or the time to do a different activity to help them self-regulate. Okay. And I think sometimes just because a bell goes we're just trying to shove people into the maths lesson where that might not be the right time for that individual. So inclusion isn't necessarily about trying to make everything the same for everyone then. In fact, kind of the opposite perhaps. Absolutely. I think that's where people go wrong. Okay. Where they're trying to force an individual into a situation that's prescribed. You know, the best will in the world, headteachers may be writing their timetable for the next year on the beach or in the hotel in Dubai. But the reality is that, you know, you're not going to know those individuals and how their response is to that because until you're there, you know, until you start in September, and also, you know, emotional regulation and those individual needs don't stop when a bell goes at 3.15. It's about a continuum over time and into the evening. So again, I think, you know, different things like sleep patterns, nutrition and exercise and things that can all feed into our state of arousal, you know, that ourselves have asleep deprived. We're going to be more ratty and, you know, a bit more annoyed and perhaps less focused, you know, has been proved when it comes straight off the flight to Dubai. But, you know, the point is understanding that is really important within how we work with families and those young people in schools. So in terms of, like, creating this calm environment that you talk about, I mean, what are the key things that, you know, someone watching this, they want to achieve it and they're school, what can you do? What are the small changes you can make? So I think, ultimately, again, our saturation model from the paper in 2011 highlights all those different elements that are really important. But I think, again, I'll come back to the fact that we've got to think of our own stress levels first. That's the core thing. We then got to think about the need for how the structure of the day looks for that individual and not assuming or presuming that because it says ready for the child, if that makes sense. And then also, I think, another core element of this is the education of the peer group. You know, we've got a large number of young people with disabilities in schools. You know, and actually in some 25 years, I don't think I've ever seen another child tip another child out of a wheelchair or somebody pull out a bone ankle hearing aid, but you do see kids testing boundaries with children who are autistic. And, you know, if we educate the peer group, I think one of the biggest untapped resources in our schools are the other kids. OK, so work with the kids. Trust them, but actually be able to come on this journey a little bit with us. And that's about how the curriculum should reflect society. So, you know, how inclusive is our curriculum? It's not just about how much people can access the learning to do with maths or history or English, but it's about how the images and the content in those lessons represents disability, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. So it's a bit of a bigger question. It is, and I think that's why it's quite hard because it's many faceted and complex and there's lots of things that move and it's almost like, I think, squeezing a balloon. You get older one bit and the other bit pops the top and you get older the next bit and you really can't get older at all, you know. It's hard. And you also said about, say, you start with yourself. So, you know, if you want this calm environment it's got to start with you. I mean, that's quite a lot to ask. It is. And I wonder as well how many professionals in schools actually do think about their own stress levels and have strategies or there's a real emphasis in supporting each other in knowing themselves if that makes sense. I mean, lots of schools do wellbeing activities and things but sometimes that can be almost having the opposite effect where there's a session after school that you have to attend for your own wellbeing, whereas actually the teacher might be better going home and having some time or going for a swim or relaxing, for example. So, again, there can be conflicts in how people try and implement various strategies. But, you know, good schools have good support from the leadership of those schools. Headteachers are strong, but also understand it's important about the whole community within their schools and supporting some staff as well. And presumably these ideas are around the kind of lower rows and creating the calm environment and being inclusive. This isn't just something for people who are trying to include a wide variety of difficulties in the cast. This kind of should work for everyone, I guess. Absolutely. And, you know, every single person is going to benefit from a calm purposeful environment. If there is a tension in the lessons, or we always feel things are on the edge as it were, people are going to be anxious and therefore not be in the best place to look. So calm. We try and remain calm. And I suppose it's the irony of doing this interview here. But, you know, you can't always eliminate risk. I think that's key. You can manage it and you can reduce risk associated with things that we can get ahead of. But the key really is about being proactive as possible and so therefore we have to be less reactive when things happen or go wrong. And what if things do go wrong? How do you kind of rescue this? Yeah, I think at the end of the day, if somebody is in an extreme state of dysregulation they are not available for learning or understanding. So you've got to allow them. And you might have strategies that you've worked with that young person on, or it may be the family, have a great strategy that they can use and tell the school about. But then it's about planning after that how we change those structures moving forward. You know, we talk about these things like metacognition learning to learn and things like that about how we engage in a discussion about learning. And I think we should do that also in about our states of stress and emotional regulation. How many conversations do we have with young people how they're feeling, how the roots into a certain situation occurred and whether they're able to reflect or use a system in the future to change how that might look if the same thing happened again. So part of this is about education, giving them the language or the tools to communicate what's happening so we can pick it up early as well. I think it's about facilitating a conversation in that area. And it's not really, you know, some people stop me and say, well pre-verbal youngsters or very young children, how could they do that and things. Well, there's many different ways you can do it with smiley face pictures and indicating an emotional state or having a set of egg cups with a ping-pong ball and you drop the ball in whichever one you feel. So then our ways that we can engage in that but actually when we're calm is the time to do it, you know, not when we're in the heightened state of a rousal. Absolutely. That whole thing of, yeah, prepare for crisis at times of call. You know, it's that old quote, you know, when somebody's drowning, it's not the time to teach them how to swim. So we better be careful on the edge. Absolutely. Oh, brilliant. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Really, really helpful.